Defender Direct sells affordable security systems to individuals who want to keep their homes and loved ones safe. To stay ahead of their competition and to ensure client satisfaction, Defender Direct staffed their call centers with consultants educated on the intricacies of their security systems. To drive more calls to their call centers, Defender Direct decided to implement Click-to-call mobile ad campaigns.

Driving calls to the call center is critical to Defender Direct’s business model and a primary goal of their marketing efforts. With this in mind, Defender Direct turned to mobile advertising to generate new, better qualified leads. Google suggested their Click-to-call mobile search ad unit, which prominently highlights the business phone number in the ad result (see example below).

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First, Defender Direct ran a Click-to-call campaign targeted to WAP mobile phones, giving users the option to place a call directly to their call center or visit their mobile site. After this campaign performed exceedingly well, Defender Direct’s next move was to target high-end devices with full Internet browsers including the iPhone and Android platforms. The results were impressive.  ROI for Defender Direct mobile campaigns exceeded the ROI for their desktop campaigns by a factor of two. By running Click-to-call campaigns on both WAP and high end devices, Defender Direct succeeded in driving more qualified leads to their call centers.

With an overwhelming 75-80% of Defender Direct’s online advertising clicks coming from mobile devices, they have now allocated a quarter of their total online advertising budget to this platform. This campaign is an excellent example of how advertisers can take advantage of new opportunities in mobile to successfully reach their business goals in different and unique ways. To learn more about this ad format, please read our Click-to-call Best Practices post.

Posted by Dalia Mitra, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

This post has been cross posted from the Inside AdWords Blog:

When you’re out and about, is your phone your go-to computer? If you find yourself doing mobile searches for information, directions, or even real-time price comparisons, you’re not alone--mobile search is growing fast. Over the past two years, Google's mobile searches have grown by more than five times. Furthermore, in the third quarter of 2010, Google mobile searches jumped 130% year over year.

Given the growth of mobile search, it’s no surprise that more and more of you are looking to capitalize on the mobile advertising opportunity. If you’re already a mobile advertiser or if you’re looking to make your jump onto the small screen, your job has just gotten easier.

Mobile Statistics in the Keyword Tool

The Keyword Tool now helps you build a better keyword list to target mobile users. Under "Advanced options," you can now search for keywords for devices with mobile WAP browsers, mobile devices with full Internet browsers (think iPhone and Android phones), or all mobile devices (sum of devices with WAP browsers and devices with Internet browsers).

When you do a keyword search, the statistics you see for Competition, Global and Local Monthly Searches, and Local Search Trends are all specific to the device or devices that you’ve selected.

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Let us know what you think of this new feature by clicking the “Send Feedback” link in the Keyword Tool or by going directly to our feedback form.

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew.

Mobile usage continues to explode, and we continue to see rapid growth throughout the AdMob network of mobile sites and applications. What does this mean for mobile advertising? Today we receive more ad requests in a single day than AdMob received for the entire month of December 2007. That’s a magnitude of 30 times in just over three years.

Here are a few quick stats on what’s happening in our network:
* The AdMob network now receives more than 2 billion ad requests per day, more than quadrupling over the last twelve months.
* More than 100 million unique Android and iOS devices requested an ad each month, nearly doubling over the last six months.
* Rapid growth is global. Nine countries in the AdMob network generated more than a billion monthly ad requests in December 2010, up from just one country a year ago.
* The strongest regional growth in monthly ad requests over the past year has come from Asia (564%), Western Europe (471%) and Oceania (363%).




As we kick off 2011, we continue to be excited about the rapid growth of the mobile industry and of mobile advertising. It’s clear that the growth trajectory of the entire mobile industry is just going to continue to get steeper this year, creating big opportunities. Are you ready for mobile in 2011?

Posted by Harsh Shah, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

This January, we launched a Click-to-call functionality for mobile ads that enables advertisers to directly connect with potential customers over the phone. In less than a year, Click-to-call (CTC) ads have come a long way and hundreds of thousands of advertisers are using the ad format today. In fact, over the past three months we've seen the number of Google advertisers using phone extensions on mobile grow 28% month-over-month, globally. What’s more, Click-to-call ads on both Google Search and Display Networks are generating millions of calls every month on mobile.

We’re excited to see this response to Click-to-call ads and we’re only just getting started! Since the initial launch, we’ve continued to innovate on the CTC platform by developing a variety of new ad formats to help advertisers reach their marketing objectives. In recent studies we found that when compared to ads without phone numbers, Click-to-call ads drive a 6-8% average increase in click-through rates. To help you maximize the power of Click-to-call, we’ve put together the following best practices for our recent CTC enhancements so that you can easily choose the ad format that best fits your campaign goal. Please note that while these ad formats are eligible to show on the Google Display Network, these tips are specific to campaigns that are targeting Google.com and are opted-in to show on high-end devices with full Internet browsers.


Drive calls to a centralized number with Phone Extensions

Whether you are national advertiser with a call center or just want to drive calls to a specific phone number, the Phone Extensions ad format can be a useful tool. Phone Extensions enable you to include a phone number in your mobile ad that will remain the same, regardless of where the ad is showing.  For example, if you have a national 1-800 number, adding it to your Phone Extension will result in the ad displaying that exact number to users located in California and to users located in New York.  Giving customers the option to instantly make contact with you is a great way to drive qualified leads as well as scale your business. To learn more about this ad format, please read the Phone Extensions announcement.


Focus on phone calls with Call-only Creative

Many businesses value phone calls and website visits differently. If you specifically want to connect with your customers over the phone, you can now use the Call-only Creative to create campaigns solely focused on driving calls to your business. An enhancement that works with Phone Extensions, the Call-only Creative ensures that your phone number is the only clickable part of your mobile ad. Since a call costs the same as a click to your ad, you can completely focus on fostering phone interactions with your desired audience via your mobile campaigns. To learn more about this ad format, please read the Call-only Creative announcement.

Measure performance with Call Metrics for Phone Extensions and Call-only Creative

For more insight into the performance of your Phone Extensions and Call-only Creative ads, enable the AdWords Call Metrics feature.  Using a dynamically assigned Google Voice number, Call Metrics provide campaign-level statistics on the number of phone leads generated by your AdWords ads including call duration and caller area code. Currently, Call Metrics is only available to a limited number of US advertisers, but we plan to bring this feature to more advertisers in the coming months. To learn more about Call Metrics, please visit please visit Google Ad Innovations.


Help customers remember your phone number with Vanity Phone Numbers

Do most of your business transactions take place over the phone? If so, including a vanity phone number in your ads can help customers remember how to contact you when they need your products or services. An enhancement to Phone Extensions, Vanity Phone Numbers allow you to display an alphanumeric phone number in your mobile ad. As seen in the image above, instead of using 1-800-836-3464 in their mobile ad, 1-800-VENDING can use their actual business name. To learn more about this ad format, please read the Vanity Phone Numbers announcement.


Reach local customers with Location Extensions

Trying to connect with the on-the-go and ready-to-buy local consumer? Adding a location specific business phone number to your ads can help you effectively engage with this audience. Let’s say you own a chain of pizza restaurants and you want to ensure that customers can instantly reach the pizza place nearest to them. Since Location Extensions ads are served based on a users’ location, hungry patrons will click and call the closest restaurant instead of the one across town. As an additional benefit, this ad format displays your address and business location on an expandable map and can help navigate customers to your store.  For more information about this ad format, please read the Location Extensions announcement.

We hope you’ll find these tips useful and we look forward to developing more Click-to-call features for you in the future.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Google Mobile Ads Product Manager

As the online audience shifts from desktop to the mobile web, we’ve seen incredible growth in the volume of mobile search queries. Over the past two years, Google's mobile search traffic has grown fivefold. And this year alone Google mobile search volumes have doubled in Latin America and South East Asia.  

To help advertisers connect with users in fast developing mobile markets, we are extending WAP ad support on Google Search to 15 new countries (listed in the image below).

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While we are working to drive mobile innovation in countries with a strong high-end device presence, we’ve also developed optimized ad formats for feature-phone-dominant markets. WAP-based mobile ads are an effective way to reach customers who are located in regions with high feature phone usage. In addition, advertisers find WAP ads to be particularly useful in expanding the magnitude of their mobile campaigns and in delivering powerful mobile calls to action. If you’d like to create a WAP mobile ad, please visit our Help Center for instructions.

Posted by Chrix Finne, Product Manager, Google Mobile Ads

The AdMob team at Google recently worked with the Coca-Cola Company to produce a live wallpaper celebrating the holiday season based on their annual holiday commercial.  Live wallpapers are animated homescreen backgrounds that respond to both touch and phone movement, and can also react to the time of day and a device’s geographic location.  This is the first time the AdMob team has worked with an advertiser on creating this type of mobile experience.

Coke’s annual holiday commercial features Santa in his workshop, surrounded by snowglobes displaying various winter cityscapes. Santa brings holiday cheer to the characters in the snowglobe by tilting the globes to bring together couples and families under a snowy winter sky.  Coke’s live wallpaper takes the user into this snowglobe experience. You can visit scenes from the video and tilt your phone to move the characters, just like Santa. Shaking your phone twirls the snow around, turning your Android phone into the snowglobe Santa interacts with in the holiday commercial! This experience is truly interactive and fun for the customer, while also providing a powerful branding opportunity and bridging marketing efforts across different channels. Advertisers have the chance to be the first thing a user sees when unlocking their phone or exiting from a mobile app.

Coke will be promoting this live wallpaper experience through a mobile display advertising campaign on the AdMob network. AdMob allows advertisers to target Android users as they use applications and browse the mobile web from their phone. By sending users directly to the Android Market, Coke maximizes their live wallpaper conversion rate. This reach ensures that the most people possible will be able to enjoy the wallpaper throughout the holiday season.

The video below shows how you can download the Coke wallpaper from an auto-play interactive video ad on the AdMob Network.

You can download the Coke live wallpaper by visiting the Android Market from your mobile device.

Posted by Vicky Homan, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

Last week I attended the L.A. Mobile Entertainment Summit which brought together some of the leading media companies such as Weather.com and ESPN to think about mobile.  I participated in a monetization panel which discussed some of the big questions on the minds of content creators today: Should we build applications or mobile web sites?  What’s the role of operators and platforms? Should we launch free or paid apps?  

Although these are important questions to ask, as with online, there is no one size fits all strategy. The mobile platform is evolving faster than any prior media platform and there will always be new things to consider - HTML5, tablets, app marketplaces, etc.  Media companies need to stop looking for a silver bullet solution and start building, collecting data and iterating to figure out what works best for their content and consumers.  Thomas Ellsworth, CEO at GoTV Networks, made a great point that you need to start with the “end in mind” when building your mobile strategy by figuring out how “mobility” will benefit your consumer.  Think about these key questions:

• What is the value you are providing consumers?
• How does mobile complement your existing business?  
• Does mobile provide an opportunity to acquire new customers? Or will it help tie deeper into your existing base?
• Should mobile be monetized separately or be included in the online value proposition?
• Are there opportunities to create new experiences that leverage the mobile context such as location, mobile payments, or voice recognition?

The best advice I can give to media publishers is to just get started and prepare to measure and analyze.  RJ Kirkland, Regional Vice President at The Weather Channel described how they launched the Weather.com app for $5 and it went nowhere.  Once they offered a free, ad-supported version, it exploded.  Kirkland’s example shows that companies that test and iterate improve their chances of success on mobile.

Get out there and start interacting with your consumers on mobile to determine the most used or requested features, when and how consumers engage your content on mobile versus online, and the unique characteristics of users that share or pay for content.  The development cycle on mobile often matches online so these insights will help you optimize across consumer channels.  Build for mobile with this iteration process in mind so that you are collecting data from the beginning and can start answering these questions.  

Mobile is evolving faster than any technology we have seen in a long time. It’s exciting, but it’s daunting. The most important thing you can do to be successful on mobile, is to start now.  

Good luck!

Posted by Jordan Kobert, Mobile Partnerships - Media and Entertainment.

Jordan Kobert is responsible for growing and developing Google's mobile publisher network in North America, with a focus on media and entertainment. In this role, Jordan works with publishers and content creators to develop new revenue streams for their mobile business. Jordan has spent the last 7 years developing and implementing monetization strategies for Mobile and Internet companies and joined Google as part of the company’s acquisition of AdMob.