Location is everything...

Wait, what does this mean?

Well, let’s say that someone is on their smartphone and standing in front of a coffee shop. If this person is using a mobile app that incorporates Location Based Advertising, it becomes possible for an advertiser to know that this person is actually standing in front of a coffee shop, and send them an relevant ad (or coupon, or whatever) instantly.  This ad can be from the coffee shop they are standing in front of, or it can even be for the competition down the street and around the corner. Perhaps this ad from the competition is so compelling it entices the consumer to travel a bit farther up the street, and reap the discount from the ad they just got.

This actually happens on a regular basis with Location Based Advertising, as this form of advertising has been shown to be quite effective. It is a powerful thing for a business to know a consumer is in close proximity to their store and offer them an incentive to make them take those final steps to enter the store.

This is exactly what Location Based Advertising does. It knows where the consumer is positioned in the real world and delivers an ad for a product/service that is “close by” the current location of the consumer.

OK, that’s great!  But how does it work?  Sounds complicated…

Yes, you are right, the technology behind Location Based Advertising is insanely complicated, but we won’t let that get in our way of learning some of the basics about Location Based Advertising!

How about a quick Q&A?

Q: How does Location Based Advertising “know” the current location of a consumer so they can send them an ad?
A: Most of today’s high end smartphones (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia) have what is known as a GPS chip.  A GPS chip is a little microchip that interprets signals from GPS satellites in space and figures out your current position based on those signals. These chips can also figure out your position by using cell tower triangulation to “jump start” the process of getting your GPS position. This “jump start” makes the process of getting your current location much faster. By using cell phone tower triangulation, it means getting a consumer’s location can now happen within seconds, and not minutes as is the case when using GPS radio signals alone.  Most of the same modern smartphones that have a GPS chip also have the ability to use cellphone triangulation. In reality, the differences between these two technologies is not something you necessarily need to worry about, but still it is some good background info to have.

Q: If I am walking down the street, how close do I have to be to a place of business before I get one of these “Location Based Ads”?
A: Traditionally you would get an Location Based Ad served to you as soon as you cross a Geofence.

Q: Geofence?  Eh, what’s that?
A: A geofence is nothing more than an predefined area on a map.  In Location Based Advertising, the place of business doing the advertising is usually in the middle of the area defined by the Geofence.  Traditionally, the defined area (Geofence) is nothing more than a simple circle drawn around the place of business. (or a square or a polygon). How far out this geofence is drawn, (a few blocks, a few miles, etc) all depends on the ad campaign and the goals of the advertiser. Once a consumer is inside the area of the geofence, they are served up a Location Based Ad.  To reiterate: Outside the Geofence, no ad, inside the geofence, you get served an ad. Simple!

Blue area denotes Geofence with coffee shop in the middle. Green marker is outside the geofence. Red marker is inside the geofence.

Q: Why should I care about this Geofence?
A: The timing of the delivery of your ad to the consumer needs to be useful and relevant based on their location.  For example, in a large city with many coffee shops and lots of pedestrians, it might be most effective to make your Geofence small, and send out the ad to consumers only within a 3 block area.  Anyone outside that 3 block area will usually not feel compelled to travel more than 3 blocks for a  coffee shop and your ad will not be as effective . Conversely, for a coffee shop in a small town on a major highway, it might be most effective to stretch that Geofence out to 3 miles and get people as they are coming into town on the highway.  Finding the “sweet spot” of the size and shape of your Geofence to make your ad campaign the most effective will be the thing that distinguishes your marketing skills from the rest of the pack.

So, there you have it, a quick overview to some of the more important concepts associated with Location Based Advertising.

Location Based Advertising is set to become the new norm in the coming years, so start your education now. You will want to position yourself and take advantage of this emerging field in the future.  And remember, “the early bird gets the worm”, and Location Based Advertising is one worm which you will want to make sure to be early enough to get!

Whether you’re creating custom geos or optimizing by state or province, there are a lot of efficiencies to be had by taking the user’s location into consideration when setting up and managing your display campaigns. Here are a few examples and tricks of the trade.

Location, Location, Location – Ad Targeting & Retargeting

Obviously for advertisers with a physical location, geography is going to be a key variable in a user’s propensity to convert. When considering the geographical areas to target, be sure you do so in the context of your display buying strategy.

When planning a media buy, I always think of geo targeting and targeted media as having an inverse relationship. The more targeted the media, the less geo-targeting is needed. The less targeted the media, the more geo-targeting is needed.

Media Targeting vs Geo-Targeting

Example: We manage a hotel campaign with locations throughout Hawaii. Retargeting is the most targeted of all display buys and we’re able to hit their ROI goals regardless of geo. In general, you should never limit the reach of your retargeting campaigns by applying geo restrictions. The travel category buys only perform in Hawaii and on the West Coast of US and Western Canada. It turns out most people on the East Coast in-market for warm weather travel chooses the Caribbean over Hawaii. We’re able to get the Run-of-Exchange (ROE) buys to perform by just targeting all of Hawaii at very low CPMs.

So the further a user is from the core market area the more targeted the media buy needs to be. The closer a user is the core market area, the greater the chances of them converting, thus we can afford to buy cheaper less targeted inventory.

This layered approach to geo-targeting allows you to cast a wide net geographically, while also testing a wide variety of placements in the immediate geographic area of the advertiser’s location. You have the best of both worlds and can apply the insights from one strategy to another.

This is an example on a macro-level, but you can also apply these concepts at the local level. When advertisers have multiple locations with smaller market areas you might need to go more granular on the geo-targeting.

For example: with a national health and fitness client we do ROE for all of the locations zip codes and a Fitness Category buy at 20 mile radius of the locations. We also bid higher for users within the 10 mile radius vs. those in the 10-20 mile radius. Also, using Dynamic creative optimization to have the specific location inserted in the creative can also help make the ad more relevant to the user.

Think Outside the Geo-Targeting Box

There's more than one way to geo-target a cat, I mean ad...

Even if an advertiser doesn’t have a physical location or a defined market area, you’ll still want to review the geo report on a regular basis. Due to a variety of factors, performance can vary greatly by geography. In those cases, be sure to optimize your bids accordingly at the State or Province level to start, and then eventually by DMA.

Depending on the advertiser there can also be hidden geographical trends, so I would encourage you to look beyond the conventional geo confines of State/DMA/City, and see if performance varies by factors like:

• Rural vs. Urban vs. Suburban
• Cold Weather Regions vs. Warm Weather Regions
• College Towns vs. Bedroom Communities
• Residential Zips vs. Commercial Zips
• Red States vs. Blue States

The bottom line is, don’t be afraid to experiment with geo-targeting. Discovering and leveraging those kinds of geo-based insights might be the X factor in making a campaign work. Always keep in mind the inverse relationship between targeted media and targeted geos. Doing both to the extreme can limit your reach, so remember to strike that balance. And when in doubt, always err on the side of casting a wider net and then letting the data in the geo report speak for itself.

Credit: Jeff the Trojan

The average player’s driver is capable of hitting the ball 60-70 yards farther today. Irons are more forgiving, no matter where impact is made on the clubface. Golf balls go farther with no loss of feel or spin.

My favorite advance is GPS. From this, you get the exact distance to the hole, and to the hazards. How has it helped us? Well, it helps some players remember which hole they’re playing after the beer cart has made one too many visits.

Some pros do very well by pushing the equipment rules to their limits. Unknown Matt Every began this year with a putter that resembled a black metal railway tie. Turns out the “Black Swan” putter has some pretty advanced engineering built in: the highest “putter momentum of inertia in putter history,” and a “sweet spot three balls wide”! Every led the Sony Open going into the final round, but fell back a bit, settling for a tie for sixth, and $178,062.50. A bit better than my $62.50 in lifetime golf earnings.

Why, with all the hardware in the bag, don’t amateurs’ average scores improve? A few reasons:

• Practice and technique mean a lot more to scoring performance than equipment.
• Commitment and passion feed into practice and technique.
• The 10,000 hours rule: You’re not going to get there playing 10 rounds a year (that would take you 200 years — and arthritis poses a real problem at this point.)
• Strategy: Top pros “think their way around the course.” Golf presents a series of puzzles with each hole. Not attempting to solve them eats away at your score, bit by bit.
• Games often get harder when everyone has access to the same improved tools. For example, to compensate for the added length of players’ drives, course were lengthened, and given more “teeth”.
• Feel: You have to swing the club, which means a connection between mind, body, ball, situation, and space. Having scientists improve “velocity and power” without adjusting other variables might make you a worse player overall.
• Forgiving clubs keep more hopeless players keep coming out. Such players don’t even learn the basics like a correct grip. The average score suffers.

Leonardo da Vinci's Flying Machine

When you hand over a miracle tool to the general population, the wide divergence in responses to them is amazing.Casual golfers always used to make the excuse that unlike the pros, they didn’t have a caddie who carried around a “yardage book” for every nook and cranny on the course. With the advent of GPS, that excuse was gone.

So what does the average player do when given the information that on a 370-yard hole, the water hazard begins 230 yards from the tee, and ends 260 yards from the tee? Pulls out his “big stick,” and tries to clear the water, or thinks/hopes “I rarely hit that far, so at worst I’ll cozy up 227 yards down the fairway”. And… whack! 252 yards, a beautiful looking shot… if only… that hazard wasn’t there. Plop! Yet all along, there was a much higher probability of scoring par by starting with a shot of roughly 205 yards, using a 205-yard club (most players will score no differently from 95 yards out and 165 yards out).

In other words, you give an amateur a powerful tool, and he doesn’t use it for any consistent, directed purpose. The player invests virtually no strategic effort in order to capitalize on new information he has at his disposal. The question to be asked there was “what should be done about the hazard”? The answer was, by default: nothing. Keep playing the way you always do.

Moore’s Law and the Cloud-Based Bubble Economy/Bubble

In every field – perhaps more so in computing than others – we’ve seen stunning increases in raw power and performance over the past fifty and even ten years. Moore’s Law (not strictly a scientific ‘law’), the feverish push for increases in computing speed  (which drove Intel to great performance over the years), has translated into outcomes and economic transformations that couldn’t have happened without them.

Yet as a society we still face many challenges. We don’t face bandwidth scarcity or content distribution costs like we did twenty years ago, yet we still live with many zero-sum games, including those involving precious commodities like water, breathable air, and yes, even food.

Before the mania for “computing in the cloud” really began to take off, but long after pioneers had already pieced together low-cost business tools to launch their unique dreams and schemes, I was struck to hear Google CEO Eric Schmidt reflecting on the remarkable business climate we live in today.

The “cost of launching a startup” was near zero, went the line. And on paper I know this to be true.

The Eric Schmidt Perspective

The cost of running some kinds of tech startups plunged – 90 to 98 percent, perhaps – between 1996 and 2006. So you can pretty much do anything you set your mind to (assuming you have a computer science degree or two, a one-bedroom apartment, and an Internet connection.) This became a popular line at Google, delivered by other popular Google keynote speakers. It was as if they and others in Silicon Valley were part of a liberating army, removing costs from the climate of opportunity, to allow the best and brightest sparks to ignite without the burden of debt or massive VC fundraising efforts.

It’s only been about fours years since those comments, but on reflection, they clearly paint a very partial picture of the reality.

An “unprecedented great climate for business” turned into a credit squeeze, a deep recession, and a recognition that much of the wider economic bubble that had been fueling so much risk-taking was sustained by unsustainable economic demand and record levels of household debt.

So that’s one thing. Rent and food will still cost you. And to earn those, you generally need a job, not a cool startup plan and free software.

And funny thing: the biggest news to come was not about all the shoestring startups somehow hitting it big, but rather, how much more investor money was starting to pile into young companies to help them at the seed rounds right through to A, B, and C rounds of venture financing and beyond. That doesn’t count all the big media companies divesting (or simply losing) old assets and putting whatever capital they have left or can raise into a variety of digital enterprises.

Web 2.0 Propaganda

Web 2.0 VC “bubble” money (after briefly drying up in the crunch) fed smoothly into the next phase: a doubling-down into a massive tech IPO bubble that rewarded the boldest and biggest players (and their investment bankers). Pandora, Groupon, LinkedIn, Zillow, Angie’s List, Zynga, TripAdvisor, (and, coming soon, Yelp and Facebook) raised huge amounts of capital in their attempts to go for broke and become “category killers” — much as Amazon had done (as it turned out, successfully) all those years ago.

Facebook, Zillow, and Twitter combined raised in the vicinity of one billion dollars prior to going public.

So much for the idea that starting a company is cheap, and that virtually anyone can do it without the aid of the financial markets. Remarkable founders, remarkable teams, remarkable investors, remarkable network effects with users, remarkable media stories, etc. created a “spiky” world of new tech giants with massive consumer followings, not a flat, fun world where everyone got to work on their pet projects.

So the availability of cheap bandwidth, remote teamwork, and useful SaaS tools – even ones that cost 90-98% less than they did a decade ago – gets a lot more people to the first tee now, but few hit it well enough to be able to quit their day job.

True pioneers and visionaries may not be so different from regular people – or so some business books now tell us. Well, they’re certainly human. And they’re not reckless, necessarily. But they’re generally massive outliers in some way. You give them the tools, and they are in a tiny minority of individuals who can ignite those sparks into a bonfire of growth. [For more on this, see the section on Bill Gates' remarkable success in Jim Collins, Great By Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All (HarperBusiness, 2011, pp. 162-166).]

Limitations: Moore’s Law & Economies of Scale

Moore’s Law has certainly made a wide variety of technological innovations possible, and this has an impact not only on your lifestyle, but on all fields.

But such ‘laws’ don’t always seem to change our fortunes. Some environments aren’t even compatible with such laws.

A Fish Out of Water - Credit: Julian Burgess

Golf comes with a built-in social and physical environment that dictates a tempering of raw “power.” We may not quite have Moore’s Law in golf clubs – among other things, courses would eventually reach the size of our solar system. A “club” has to do its thing within certain limitations. Players can’t propel the ball into orbit with rocket launchers. Perhaps that’s just common sense. And then there is etiquette to think about.

Moore’s Law doesn’t, by itself, make great companies. Nor do cheaper, faster tools generally.

If barriers to entry on (for example) computing and storage were lowered to zero, it would might create a whole new set of challenges in any industry.

We can't all be cover girls...

Moore’s Law doesn’t mean you can become Tiger Woods.

Moore’s Law can’t even exist in social environments that restrict pure advances in speed, power, or output. Playing “better,” or more “favorably,” not “bigger, faster, and dirtier” is often truly the game you’re playing… something that gets lost in breathless media and coverage of the “pure advances” in things like chip technology. [For a thoughtful counterpoint to breathless technology and business media, see Umair Haque's views on value cycles, renewable resources, and the tech industry's penchant for creating 'thin value'. Umair Haque, The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business (Harvard Business Press, 2011).]

Cloud computing won’t turn all garage hackers into Mark Zuckerberg.

Plus, you wouldn’t want it to.

These are tools, plain and simple.

The tools are incredibly powerful in the right hands. And nearly useless in the wrong ones.

Making them cheaper, or free, doesn’t always spur a sudden uptake of grateful users.

Most middle-class families today can afford gym memberships, Nordic skating skis, and even personal trainers.

All families can afford running shoes.

And yet the obesity epidemic shows no signs of abating.

Why Cost is Good

Where am I headed with all this? I should be here to talk about marketing automation tools, which is mainly the subject of the Acquisio blog, right?

I’ll talk about all of that quite a bit in the coming year. But I just had to get that off my chest.

I like that so many of these tools are affordable to so many of us, that’s for sure. I once wrote an article that lauded then-new Google Analytics for “democratizing” actionable analytics, to put it within reach of the average business.

GA’s free power is a great example of today’s awesome and more level playing field for the smaller business, certainly. No one would want this game to be playable only by a cartel of companies who can afford six figures a year for Web Analytics, for example.

But some cost is good. Some cost (whether it’s in time, hustle, or cash) helps the more passionate and committed among us get a bit of an advantage over those who won’t invest.

Back to the wide world of sports: in my brief, inauspicious career in high school cross-country skiing, those of us who lived in warmish climates spent quite a bit of time in the offseason doing what was called “dryland training”: running up and down ravines in sweltering temperatures, and strapping on early “roller skis” to pole around on dead-end streets.

Credit: Daniel Malmhall

The investment in strange (and somewhat expensive) equipment paid off in performance. And wouldn’t you know, dryland training turns out to be another spectacular example of how methods that give you an edge in one era become mere “tablestakes” in another.

All professional hockey players, for example, train throughout the summer. Being “in shape” isn’t much of an advantage in pro hockey today.

Despite the fact that others will eventually catch up to your entrepreneurial use of new tools and methods, maybe that’s just it.

An “edge” is never forever. But those that seek an edge are often rewarded.

The tools will never literally be your edge, but if you find yourself leveraging their power when others are busy with something else, chances are your passion to discover powerful new tools is a symptom of your personal commitment to superior performance.

How committed can you be? To be truly great at anything, you need a level of commitment that is – to put it mildly – unbalanced. As the great David Feherty put it: “If you’re good at this game, there’s something seriously wrong with you. [...] If you have dinner with Vijay Singh and a pea rolls into his mashed potatoes, he’s got a fork in his hand, but he’s looking at a bunker shot.”

As a result, the ClickEquations blog will be merged with the Acquisio blog. This means that if you’re subscribed to the ClickEquations blog, you’ll soon start getting updates from the Acquisio blog feed.

The Acquisio blog updates several times a week with tips, insights and strategies to help marketers get the most out of their online campaigns. From PPC and display ad insights to mobile marketing and social media strategies, the Acquisio blog is full of expert advice from both the Acquisio team and a roster of guest bloggers.

So if you’re subscribed to the ClickEquations blog, we look forward to updating you with Acquisio’s great content. And if you’re not already subscribed, we hope you’ll consider adding the Acquisio blog feed to your favorite RSS reader.

Facebook Ads

Convincing brands to allow your agency to spend their money on Facebook ads is a tough sell.

It’s a ‘tough sell’ because they know, as well as you do, that Facebook is an emerging channel where few of the rules are known, and in which the conditions are constantly changing.

With this knowledge many brands say that they should manage their own Facebook ad campaigns or avoid serving any ads at all. Some report that they have tested Facebook ads with other agencies and that it didn’t work or that they have heard many stories of ad campaigns going wrong and that they don’t want to waste their budget.

A disconnect often occurs where Paid Search Experts at agencies take the opinion that Facebook ads will run the same as Google ones, while brand managers on the client side hold the view that Facebook ads are more akin to Display advertising; totally different to Google.

The upshot of this is that brands are not convinced by the credentials of Agency-Land to deliver Facebook ads successfully. Yet.

I am sure that this will ring true for every one of you.

It is my intention with this column to give an insight each month into how you may be able to better-demonstrate value to your clients with this challenging channel, making it easier for you to win, grow and keep Facebook advertising business in 2012.

Facebook Ad Testing

Today’s insight is to make everyone aware that in order to succeed with Facebook ads, you must commit to a culture of continuous testing and learning. At best this statement seems obvious, and at worst it may sound patronising, but go with me for a moment. I have daily conversations with marketing experts where it is clear that Facebook campaigns are being run without a rigorous testing plan and without any commitment to learning about a new channel.

The most common examples of this would be:

1. Making just 3 or 5 creative variants for a one month campaign.
2. Selecting no refined targeting metrics, or bundling all targeting together so that it becomes impossible to identify which demographic is working best or indeed, worst.
3. Setting ads live on day one of a campaign and not logging in to check on their performance until day 30.

Leaving aside the first two bullet points (which I will come back to in detail for future articles), I think that the first way you can add value to your clients’ campaigns and start to internalise new learning within your agency is to make sure you are not falling victim to number 3 above.

Facebook Ads Are Not PPC

I have occasionally found PPC experts who expect to be able to deploy a ‘set and forget’ strategy on Facebook, but Facebook is much more volatile than Google, with fewer knowns and far fewer experts. Therefore, practitioners must obsess over their campaigns as much as they can find the time to do so.

Please take it from my two and a half years of Facebook-focused advertising experience that setting and forgetting a strategy on Facebook will not work, and that pulling  just one report at the end of a month’s campaign is not sufficient.

It might be the case that the client is only asking for ‘wrap up data’ at monthly or weekly intervals. But if you have any aspirations for the campaign to be a success against its KPIs, you will need to be looking at, analysing, and optimising on a daily basis.

Daily reviews and optimisation actions are the minimum required with a channel as new, full of potential and as volatile as this.

If you have run campaigns on Facebook yourself you will have seen that an ad that was working perfectly well last week stops working the next, or perhaps today’s campaigns just stop spending tomorrow. Indeed, the eagle-eyed amongst you will see how some ads may start strong in the morning but plummet by the afternoon.

The Facebook ecosystem is changing day on day on day, and if you are not watching those changes as they happen then you are definitely wasting some, or possibly all, of your budget.

Managing Facebook Ad Expectations

All reasonable clients expect there to be some wastage in opening a new channel like Facebook, and they know that learnings have to be made, so they should not be expecting perfect results from the outset.  And, so long as you can demonstrate you have looked closely at the campaign every day and made at least one decision to improve its performance each day, they will respect the methodology in that.

But, if it comes to the end of a one month campaign and you have spent all of the test budget for Client X without assessing and optimising as I advise, then you will struggle to give a commentary on why peaks and troughs happened on certain days, or which creative / demographics were best and why particular trends have emerged etc, etc.

In short, you will not be able to demonstrate added value to your client, you will have not gathered any new knowledge base for your agency — and will be very likely to churn the account.

An opportunity will have been lost.

Click to Visit the Video on Figaro Ditial's Site

We’ve been working with Amaze for over a year now and know just how important effective reporting is for maintaining their excellent client relationships. Making reporting quick and painless lets the agency spend more time analysing the data and advising their clients on how to further optimise results.

Getting reporting right also helps agencies focus attention on  matters such as integrating data, channels and campaigns to deliver a wealth of retargeting and attribution benefits. If you’re interested in how you can drive display success through incorporating search data, or whether to approach attribution modelling from an equal weighting or recency model, this presentation will help.

Take a look at the video on Figaro Digital’s site to find out more.

When iMedia Connection asked us recently to provide a few ideas about what performance marketing would look like in 2012, we naturally jumped at the chance. It is one of the most, vibrant, productive and effective sectors of the marketing mix and therefore one where we expect to see some key developments this coming year.

The article is called What to look forward to in 2012, and here’s an excerpt about the state of play in search, one of the most important facets of performance media:

Today’s search marketing capabilities and results have effectively commoditised this marketing channel. For some years now, none of us have worked with a brand that would not benefit from including search in their marketing efforts. This maturation has however meant that the returns achievable by agencies are diminishing, regardless of the continued innovation and efforts in the channel and thus, agencies are struggling further to monetise their services in this space.

We also referenced mobile, a topic we’ve already covered in some depth on the Acquisio blog this year:

Another hot topic that we keep coming back to is mobile. As a marketing channel, mobile seems to have topped the prediction lists all too frequently over the last decade. Consumer adoption has certainly been assured for some time now and with the continued advance of mobile internet capabilities and devices this is set to grow still further, yet marketing adoption has lagged behind. We do however believe that 2012 will be the year that changes.

For more on our predictions for the year, check out the full article at iMedia UK and do let us know how you think the year will shape up in your market – we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Laura Garrido

With such high expectations for mobile advertising this year, marketers have a lot to consider — from high-level mobile ad strategy and deployment to working out a mobile budget. Well, with Google as the #1 mobile site destination, one thing is clear enough: mobile PPC will likely be part of any mobile advertising strategy.

Recently, I got to ask Laura Garrido about her experience with mobile PPC. Laura leads the PPC team at NVI, a search marketing and social media agency in Montreal. So she’s overseen strategy and deployment for all their clients’ mobile search campaigns. During our chat, Laura touches on:

• Why to invest in mobile PPC
• How to budget for mobile PPC
• Which verticals perform best in mobile search
• and how mobile PPC strategies can differ from desktop ones

Laura Garrido on Mobile PPC

CT Moore: Why should advertisers start investing in mobile PPC?
Laura Garrido: One day you woke up and decided to start running [desktop] PPC campaigns because you understood that:

1. Your website was generating sales, either onsite or offsite, and you wanted to acquire as much qualified traffic as possible, and
2. Your competitors were investing in sponsored ads, and you wanted your share of that paid traffic too!

So why would a device that allows users to access your website immediately anywhere be opted out? I have yet to meet someone who will tell me: “Nah I don’t want to drive more targeted traffic to my website! Wait, what? More online sales? Pfft no, I’ll pass.”

Really, you need a reason to invest on Mobile Ads? Open your Analytics account, look at your traffic sources, slice your organic traffic with advanced segments and see how much traffic found your website using a mobile device. Then think of the traffic you missed because you aren’t investing in mobile PPC.

CT: How can advertisers determine how much budget to invest/divert into mobile?
LG: The beauty of PPC is that it’s measurable. The device you’re targeting, smartphone or laptop, won’t change whatever formula you use to invest on PPC. If properly setup and managed, then, you should be able calculate your ROI.

Perhaps Mobile ppc conversions turn out to be more expensive than desktop ppc conversions (or not), but if you are maxing out your reach on desktop users, why not pay a little more for a sale generated through a mobile device? As long as you still see a decent ROI…

Mobile Search Queries by Category - Source: Google 2011

CT: Are there any niches/verticals that are better suited to mobile?
LG: Personally I believe that every vertical is worth a test with mobile PPC (and any other form of marketing, for that matter). However, at NVI we manage PPC campaigns for a broad spec of industries and I have to say that we’ve seen good results for B2C businesses like tourism, entertainment and consumers goods.

CT: How do mobile PPC strategies differ from desktop PPC strategies?
LG: When we first started running Mobile PPC campaigns we expected them to differ greatly. But soon after we realized that wasn’t so much the case.

Of course, this is something on what my PPC peers might disagree with me on. But to me (just like with desktop search) it always comes down to: looking at what the data is telling you and understanding your mobile traffic behavior.

For example, if by looking at the search queries you realize that what users are searching for the most is your company’s coordinates, then give them that on your AdCopy (extend your ads with location information). You can even use the click-to-call feature AdWords is offering.

But the one and most important element of a mobile strategy is a mobile friendly website with content for mobile and a format that fits the mobile screen. If you don’t have one then I recommend you create mobile friendly landing pages.

The Early Mobile Adoption Curve

Mobile search is still a relatively new channel, and there are huge advantages to marketers become an early adopter. First, their mobile ad skills will evolve along with the channel, making the learning process a smoother, more natural one.

Second, because the channel is still young, mobile clicks are still selling below market value (and possibly yielding higher conversions). This makes it not only an opportune acquisition channel, but an ideal time to test (and develop those mobile PPC skills). Mistakes will be less risky and lessons will cost so much less.

Finally, we won’t be thinking of mobile as an entirely distinct channel forever. As devices become more portable and tablets continually blur the lines between mobile and PCs, what we consider “mobile” today (i.e. phones and tablets) will become just another targeting options within larger search and display campaigns. It’s important, then, that marketers familiarize themselves with mobile trends and data so that when this targeting option does hit critical mass, they’ll be able to integrate it properly into the marketing mix.