In the latter part of last year Lovestruck.com, one of the UK’s leading dating websites on mobile and desktop, came to us with quite a challenge. The location-aware dating site wanted to promote its free iPhone application to users in London, and only in London. We often get asked to run campaigns in one country or on specific handsets, but this was the first time that we had been asked to focus a campaign on one city, in the UK.

The campaign kicked off in May 2010 and ran across our network of mobile websites and iPhone applications.  However, unlike other campaigns, the ads promoting the Lovestruck.com app were only shown to iPhone users in London. To get the app, users simply had to click on the banner ad and they were taken through to the App Store download page for the Lovestruck.com app.

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For Lovestruck.com the key benefit of this geo-targeted approach was that it allowed them to align the campaign with the company's strategy of expanding its membership base in the UK's capital city. But this wasn't the only benefit that Lovestruck.com saw. The campaign generated a far greater return on investment than other nationwide campaigns, as it was able to target potential users more closely.

The campaign exceeded expectations considerably.  Cost per Downloads (CPD) were more than 76 percent lower than expected. This meant that we were able to work with mobile media agency Fetch Media to immediately scale the campaigns, increasing budget by more than 60 percent.

Lovestruck.com was so happy with the results of the campaign that it now spends 40 percent of its marketing budget on mobile, and has rolled out similar geo-targeted campaigns in Singapore and Hong Kong. To download the full Lovestruck case study, please click this link. 

Posted by Matt Brocklehurst, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

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