PPC Without Pity

Good news, everybody! This Friday, Google released their new mobile phone interface for AdWords to all users. Now, you can check up on your account, and make tedious account edits on a three-inch screen!

Okay, maybe I should dial back the sarcasm a little bit. Sure, this is a great tool if you really need to check up on your account on-the-go. But, I can’t imagine doing any serious PPC work on my iPhone. I’m spoiled as it is using two LCD monitors for even the most mundane of pay-per-click marketing tasks. Not to mention the fact that I’m usually flipping back and forth between multiple browser and Excel spreadsheet windows…

That being said, this should be a great feature for anyone who really needs to keep tabs on their account at all times. By allowing you to check up on your account quickly and easily, Google is making sure its advertisers don’t make any potentially dangerous snafus that end up costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Admit it – we’ve all had at least one of these in our PPC careers. It might be nice to have that little safeguard to assuage the paranoia.

I do find the interface a little unwieldy to make changes. But that is to be expected with the kind of spatial limitations Google is working with by creating a mobile site. Smartphones were never designed to do something as data-intensive as PPC. It’s nice to be able to change a bid or two on the fly, but I think I’d rather wait to get to a computer if I’m going to have to change text ads or multiple campaign settings.

The trick is to log in to your AdWords account on your computer beforehand and set up appropriate filters to cut down on the information overload. You probably don’t need to be checking in on all of your account on your phone, but maybe you have a new ad group or two that needs extra special attention. If you set up filters containing only these special groups ahead of time, you can select the filter on your smartphone to go straight to them. Scrolling through hundreds of keywords and ad groups looks like a total pain in this interface, so I’d recommend that you get on top of your filters right away if you think you’re going to be using the mobile site in the future.

I’d go into some more how-to’s on this site, but Google has already produced a pretty slick video that goes over the basics. Check it out:

When Steve Jobs recently announced iPhone OS 4 (due later this summer), he mentioned that Apple is now getting in to the mobile advertising game with “iAd,” an in-house platform for developers to create ads on mobile devices like the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Ads on Apple mobile devices are old news, but a huge technology company jumping headfirst into the booming mobile advertising space is a significant development indeed. With over 50 million iPhones and about half a million iPads sold to date, Apple already has a captive audience and a significant user base. Now, it looks like they are about to bring their trademark efficiency and innovation to the ad space as well.

I think that one of the most significant things to note about this development is who Apple is trying to crowd out of this space – Google. It’s a pretty big deal when a company as big as Apple decides to go head-to-head with the undisputed king of web advertising in a new space. Google has already made headway into advertising on Apple’s devices. AdWords users have been able to target iPhones for quite some time now, and Google just announced iPad targeting this month as well. Plus, Google beat Apple to the purchase of AdMob last October, giving them a huge inside track to in-app advertising. Clearly, Apple has not been too happy about these developments, and is likely going to take steps to push Google’s ads off of its platform. This could get interesting.

The big question is this: can Apple develop a winning ad platform in a space already dominated by experienced, well-funded competitors? Despite Apple’s consistent popularity, they don’t always win at everything they do (Remember Apple TV? Or the hockey puck mouse?). They’re a hardware company about to embark on a significant software venture. Sure, they’ve had tremendous success with the iTunes store and the app store, but those are both consumer-side ventures. Will they be able to repeat their success with an enterprise software service?

Granted, Apple is offering a generous 60/40 ad revenue cut in favor of developers, so that should sweeten the deal to get a large ad network in place fairly quickly. Add in the stories going around about basement software developers making millions from ads on a simple app or game they coded in their spare time, and I’m sure there will be plenty of places for mobile PPC ads to show on Apple’s new network. But, will this offer a good ROI for advertisers? Mobile advertising isn’t for everyone, and I’m still not entirely sold on getting conversion actions out of mobile users yet. Ever try to fill out a lead or purchase form on a smartphone? An ad network is only as good as the ROI it generates, and Apple is making a big bet that mobile ad ROI is going to be good enough for a lot of advertisers to come on board. At least Google and Microsoft have profitable search networks to fall back on while they experiment with mobile advertising. Apple has no such safety net, unless you count the billions of dollars they’re raking in on hardware and media sales.

One last word of advice to Steve Jobs: make sure your reporting and analytics on the ad network are amazing. This is what makes Google great for advertisers, and this is what any fledgling ad network needs to have to stay competitive. Advertisers don’t like it when they can’t get info on where their money is going, and how much money it is bringing in. I know Apple loves to be tight-lipped about information and really stingy with the openness of their platform. This attitude is a recipe for failure in the advertising space.

It’s too early to tell if Apple’s ad platform will revolutionize the industry. But, I think their presence will be big enough and disruptive enough to change the game for everyone. It should be an interesting summer for mobile advertisers.

With the exponential rise in smartphone use over the past year or two, you might be tempted to run a pay per click marketing campaign targeted specifically toward mobile devices. On paper, it seems like a good idea. Since there are so many more people accessing the internet on smartphones these days, it’s understandable if you want to try to reach this user segment. However, you should consider the nature of your business and its relation to mobile phone searches before you invest the time and money to create a mobile-targeted PPC campaign.

First, you need to get into the mindset of a mobile internet user. This may not be too hard, especially if you’re a smartphone owner well-versed in the pleasures of instant internet gratification. Mobile internet users are crunched for time, and are probably looking for information they can act on in a hurry. They might be en route to a store and need directions, looking for a certain type of business in their immediate area, or comparison shopping online while they browse in a brick and mortar store. The plus side is that they have a strong intent to purchase what they are after – they just need a slight push to get them where they need to be. The down side is that you don’t have a lot of time to make an impression on these hurried users.

Because of this mindset, mobile PPC campaigns that rely on a lot of bells, whistles, and customer interaction are likely to fail. Don’t target mobile users with information appropriate to the information-gathering phase of the buying cycle. Focus your landing pages on the immediate information that these users are looking for – directions to stores and quick bullet points about products and services.

Keep in mind that these people will also be viewing your landing pages on very small screens. Build a special landing page for your ads that is optimized for smartphone screens. By offering a better user experience, you can impress your potential customers.

Of course, not every business should run a mobile PPC campaign. If your product or service has a long buying cycle, and you know your users will be doing a lot of product research before making a commitment, don’t bother with a mobile campaign. People don’t do their product research on smartphones – they wait until they get home on a real computer for that. Also, if your purchase process takes more than two or three pages to complete, you probably won’t see good results from a mobile campaign. Going through a checkout process on a smartphone is a real pain, so most users are probably saving this experience for a more comfortable device.

There are some types of business that would benefit immensely from a mobile campaign, though. Bars, restaurants, and other local hot spots could see an increase in foot traffic with a little push toward smartphone users. Supplement your web local listings (Google Maps, Yelp, Yahoo Local, etc.) with a little PPC and you can help mobile users find you in your neighborhood.

If you offer a cheap, instant-gratification style product, you might succeed with a mobile PPC campaign, too. This is especially important for people selling phone applications or ringtones, but could work for any product that doesn’t require a lot of research or thought into the purchase. If you want customers to make their purchase on their smartphone, though, make sure the checkout process is as simple and short as possible.

Mobile PPC campaigns aren’t for everyone, but they will become more important over the next few years as mobile internet use continues to rise. If you do set up a campaign, make sure to track your mobile phone visitors in Google Analytics. As in any PPC campaign, you need to pay close attention to your visitor behavior and conversion metrics. Don’t be afraid to experiment until you find out what works! The rules for mobile PPC marketing are by no means set in stone, so you’ll have to take some risks to figure out what is successful.

This just in from the “I thought they had this already” department: Microsoft announces full HTML mobile device targeting for their AdCenter PPC marketing platform. Sure, Microsoft AdCenter has been in the mobile ad game for a while now, but did it really take them this long to work it out so that you can specifically target smartphone devices with full web browsers like the iPhone, Google’s Nexus One, or any number of other Palm and Android phones? Actually, they did have this capability previously, but you had to individually target each type of mobile device. At least now you can target to the general category of mobile devices, which should save you a lot of time.

Regardless of my snarky commentary, this is great news for any advertiser trying to make mobile-targeted PPC campaigns in 2010. Clearly, Google and MSN are betting big on mobile PPC marketing in 2010. Yahoo, not so much. I’m not aware of any ways to target mobile devices in Yahoo (feel free to prove me wrong in the comments!), but we’ve seen a lot of developments lately from Google and Microsoft. I’m still not totally convinced that users are going to be on board with mobile PPC just yet. I don’t think that people are ready to be advertised to on their mobile devices – it seems like a little too intimate of a medium to me. We’ll see if my cynicism is justified by the end of the year.

Either way, now would be a good time to make sure you have mobile-specific landing pages, and optimize a mobile version of your homepage for tiny smartphone screens. Whether you’re ready or not, people are going to start looking for information about your company on their mobile phones. It’s better to have a mobile version of your site ready to go and no one using it than having to scramble to make one once you see your mobile traffic take off in your web analytics program.

This week, Google announced new mobile device targeting options for AdWords campaigns. Before, you could only target computing devices (laptops, desktops, etc.), mobile devices with full internet browsers, or both. Now, Google has opened it up for much more granular targeting. You can now choose to target specific mobile phone operating systems (iPhone/iPod, Android, or Palm webOS) and specific mobile carriers such as AT&T, Verizon and Sprint.

This is a huge step for mobile PPC. By allowing for this super-specific targeting, this opens up the ability for marketers to create highly effective mobile device PPC campaigns. If you sell iPhone cases, you can create a campaign that only reaches iPhone users. Maybe you run a PPC campaign for a mobile phone service provider. You can filter out users of your own mobile service, and target only people who use your competitors to convince them to switch over to your company. Also, since Google allows for specific targeting to US and Canadian mobile providers, you can ensure that your mobile campaigns only reach users from a specific country, filtering out business travelers who might have only hopped across the border for a meeting or conference. These targeting options open up a lot of possibility for creative marketing tactics, and increased return on investment for mobile PPC campaigns, since you can filter out unqualified traffic much more easily.

This is yet another indicator that Google is taking mobile PPC advertising very seriously. Both their purchase of AdMob last year, and continued improvements to mobile traffic tracking in Google Analytics were pretty clear indicators, but this is a huge step as well. Google clearly thinks that mobile advertising is about to take off in a big way. It might be time to think about your mobile PPC strategy, and start incorporating these new tools and options into your current PPC efforts.