3 Important Considerations for Launching Mobile PPC

SEM campaign success on desktop computers doesn’t guarantee success on mobile devices. Before you spend hours, days or even weeks modifying or creating new campaigns for mobile, do some research about potential success (or failure).

Here are some important areas to consider.

Analyze Your Mobile Audience

Before starting a mobile campaign, a SEM specialist must investigate how popular smartphones are with selected markets or targeted audiences. For example, smartphones are a big part of the North American market, however, on a market such as Moldova, it is not as widely integrated in the society. The same discrepancy can be seen with the use of smartphones between different age groups. Without doing research, campaign managers can spend hours if not days analyzing and optimizing mobile campaigns for an audience which simply is not there.

The 10 Seconds Rule

Once you establish that there is a significant mobile audience for your offering, the next step in successful mobile campaign optimization is to make sure that you have the infrastructure set up to support your campaigns. Don’t set high expectations if you’re going to take mobile traffic to a non-mobile-friendly website or landing page – would you buy something on a page where you can’t see or read the content?

In PPC you have to use the good old fashion 10 seconds rule. If you can’t understand in 10 seconds what you are supposed to do on the page then don’t expect to get lots of conversions from it. Ask your colleagues to check your landing page and see if it passes the 10 seconds test.

Understand Desired Results

Once you’ve made sure that you have the resources to help your mobile campaigns pass the 10 seconds test, you need to start thinking about further optimization. First and foremost, the campaign manager must identify how many clicks it takes to get a conversion for the selected campaign. Let’s say it takes 10 clicks at a cost of $10 per click to get one conversion; then cost per conversion is $100. These numbers can be taken from the computer targeted campaigns. You can set this as a benchmark and try to achieve it on mobile devices. However, because mobile and desktop are so different, this is just a starting point, not our fixed target. This target has to be adjusted once mobile campaigns have started, but setting a benchmark will help you understand if mobile is succeeding or failing in a general sense.

Once you start your mobile campaigns and collect the necessary data to judge if you are reaching your benchmark, analysis is important. For example, if your benchmark is 10 clicks per conversion yet mobile campaigns yield 60 clicks but no conversions, this is a sign that this campaign is not mobile friendly.

One possible reason for this may be that the product you sell or offer is more likely to be purchased on a desktop device – if it involves a detailed transaction with a lot of research required – people may begin the process on mobile and convert on desktop. If you use a performance media solution such as Acquisio you can track your client’s conversion process and build an attribution model to give each click a value.

For more mobile optimization tips related to common mobile ppc problems, see Target Marketing Mag for my continued post.