As a Google Adwords certified partner, we sometimes are invited by Google’s product team for talks and updates. Today we met with them, guest speaker David Booth & a number of other Brisbane agencies for an intimate lunch and discussion about mobile technology adoption in Australia and worldwide.
Rohan presented some historical and current data for mobile adoption, engagement and attitudinal studies as well as some internal data about mobile usage. Unsurprisingly there is vast growth across all industries. Perhaps more surprisingly was the large query volume for Real Estate related searches.
David Booth from Cardinal Path (USA) is an engaging speaker well known to attendees of Google Engage events and his take on Mobile was interesting. He showed how mobile advertising can be leveraged for campaign impact and even offered some great case studies.
Some of the key points I took away included :
- Tablet growth still has not reached it’s full potential
- Transactional use of mobile (or m-commerce) probably hasn’t reached it’s potential
- Mobile traffic tends to have less conversions, but is an important early stage in the sales funnel
- Advertisers are struggling to track activity across multiple devices
- CTR rates can be improved simply by targeting a users brand of device e.g. “Special Offer for iPad 3 Users!”
- Mobile Sitelinks can have different domains to the display URL (e.g. to take someone to Facebook)
- “Exact Match” misspellings are cheaper than auto-corrected “Phrase match” clicks. (Disable this behaviour at campaign level)
- Responsive web design is a far better solution to m.subdomains with alternative “cut down” sites.
- 50% of users will never return to a site with poor mobile experience.
All in all another very informative and excellent day with the Google team. Far from the “faceless giant” corporation they may appear, Google have tried to actively engage it’s partners and promote it’s online advertising services. Did you know they even have a direct call phone number if you need help setting up campaigns?
Google AdWords is still one of the best performing online advertising strategies available today.
Also, the Bangalow Pork Belly entree was to die for.