With searches on mobile devices with full Internet browsers growing 4x over the past year, the opportunity to reach users on the go is big and growing.  Are your campaigns optimized for mobile? Creating mobile specific campaigns that are separate from desktop campaigns is a best practice  advertisers can use to drive better performance on mobile. We’ve seen that advertisers experience  an 11.5% average increase in mobile CTR when they run and optimize a separate mobile campaign, compared to their mobile CTR on a combined mobile+desktop campaign.  Earlier we shared how Roy’s Restaurants achieved an impressive 800% ROI on their advertising by employing a separate mobile campaigns strategy.

Why create separate mobile specific campaigns?
Currently many advertisers run hybrid campaigns that target both desktop computers and mobile devices. This is a sound strategy to increase reach and get started in mobile advertising, but advertisers who want to gain competitive advantage and maximize mobile performance should create separate AdWords campaigns for mobile.   By doing this you can optimize your ad strategy specifically for the mobile platform because you’ll have more control over the levers that directly affect performance.  After you create a mobile-only campaign we recommend that you follow these optimization tips:

• Exercise more control and flexibility:  By using a separate mobile-only campaign you’ll gain better visibility into your mobile specific performance and have more control to optimize your bids, keyword lists and creatives without impacting your desktop campaign.
  
• Budget and bid separately for mobile: On mobile you are competing to have your ad serve on 5 ad spots available on mobile search results page vs. 10 ad spots on desktop. It is important to bid aggressively to ensure your ads are competitive and appear prominently.
  
• Tailor your ad creatives for mobile:  Create mobile specific ad copy and calls to action such as “Receive a quote on your phone” which could attract more attention from mobile consumers.  You can also customize features like Ad Sitelinks and direct users to more mobile relevant content, such as Store Locator pages.
  
• Make the most of mobile:  You can take better advantage of powerful mobile-specific ad features such as Click-to-Call and location-based services which offer more relevance and convenience to users on the go.

How to get started with separate mobile campaigns?

To create a separate mobile campaign you’ll need to create an AdWords campaign which is targeted only to smartphones, keeping it separate from those campaigns which target desktop and laptop computers.  The fastest and easiest way to do this is to use AdWords Editor to copy your  campaign and keywords to a separate mobile-only campaign.  You can duplicate your entire campaign or select just the highest performing keywords on mobile.  

If you’re not using AdWords Editor, please follow these steps to setup new mobile-only campaigns:

1. Login to AdWords.
2. Compile your existing keywords from your existing campaigns into a spreadsheet or text file.
3. From the Campaigns tab in your account, click the New Campaign button.
4. Within your campaign settings, scroll to the Network and devices section, click ‘Let Me Choose’ under Devices and deselect ‘Desktop and laptop computers’.  Your targeting should show that you are selected into Mobile devices with full Internet browsers. 
5. Paste your keywords into the new mobile-only campaign in relevant ad groups.
6. Set the Devices for your old, copied campaigns to ‘Desktop and laptop computers’ only.
7. Use the Shared Extensions feature to easily apply any of your existing extensions (such as location and phone extensions) to your new mobile campaigns.

We hope that you’ll take advantage of this mobile best practice and find it effective in optimizing your mobile ads strategy!

Posted by Dai Pham, Google Mobile Ads Product Marketing 

This post has been cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.

By the end of 2011, an estimated one billion people around the world will be connected to the mobile web and 50% of all Americans will own a smartphone.  Because of the explosion of web-enabled mobile devices,   mobile usage is now on a hockey-stick trajectory: searches on smartphones and tablets have increased by 4x in the last year, and the world of mobile apps continues to engage mobile users—125 years’ worth of Angry Birds are played every day!

For people everywhere, the mobile era has begun.

Yet most businesses haven’t adapted their online strategies—advertising, webpage design, commerce—to mobile.  The opportunity for these businesses is huge and we want everyone to be able to take part.  On February 10, we’re hosting an event at our New York office called “ThinkMobile”: Mary Meeker, Partner at Kleiner Perkins, and our own Dennis Woodside, SVP, Americas Operations and Jason Spero, Head of Mobile, Americas, will explore some of the most significant trends in mobile and explain why it’s “not too late for businesses to still be early” in this space.  We invite you to livestream these talks at 1pm ET/10am PT this Thursday on desktop, or—for the first time from a Google event in the U.S.—on both Android and iOS mobile devices as well.  In other words, you can Think Mobile....on mobile!

Right now, advertisers engaging on mobile are increasing brand awareness, purchase intent and sales with effective mobile search and display campaigns.  Mobile developers and publishers are supporting very profitable businesses with advertising revenue.  And consumers are benefiting from relevant and useful ads on their mobile devices.

To help all businesses take advantage of the opportunities that mobile advertising presents, we’re focusing on three core principles with our mobile ads business:

• Seamless: We’re bringing the best characteristics of desktop advertising to mobile devices.  We want to help marketers and developers extend the benefits of their desktop advertising to people on mobile devices, while effectively managing their campaigns and ad space across many channels.

• Inclusive: It’s clear that mobile is about more than just one device, one type of ad format or one style of ad campaign.  Our ad solutions span across search, text, display, video, commerce and more, on a wide variety of devices, and enable businesses and consumers to connect in newly relevant and useful ways.
  
  
  
  
• Made for mobile: Mobile devices have unique characteristics like location awareness and touch screens (and the ability to make phone calls!) that make it easy for people to engage with information conveniently, and create unique opportunities for businesses as well.  Our ad solutions are built to help marketers, developers and publishers take advantage of these mobile-specific characteristics. 

The power of constant connectivity on mobile is a thrilling new reality, and has already transformed the way people engage with information, businesses and certainly with each other.  We’re just now scratching the surface of what’s possible on mobile.  This is an exciting time, and there’s much more to come.

Posted by Karim Temsamani, Global Head of Mobile

The rise of the mobile web is driving one of the most dramatic consumer behavior transformations in history. Billions of people are using their smartphones to search for information, consume news, watch video, interact through social networks and engage with advertising every day. So, what does this mean for mobile marketing?

Tune in and find out what Mary Meeker, Partner at Kleiner Perkins, Google’s Dennis Woodside, SVP of Americas Operations, and Jason Spero, Head of Americas Mobile Advertising have to say about the future of mobile and what marketers can do to better connect with the mobilized, modern consumer.

The live stream will start on February 10, 2011 at 1:05pm EST and you’ll be able to watch from your desktop computer or from your mobile device. Please register for this virtual event by visiting the Think Mobile Live Stream page.

Following us on Twitter? Use the #thinkmobile hashtag as you are watching the event.

Posted by Suzanne Mumford, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

Recently, we’ve given you a glimpse of some of the growth that AdMob has seen over the last few months.  Here are some highlights, and a few new metrics:

• The AdMob network now receives more than 2 billion ad requests per day.  This represents an increase of more than 4x in the last twelve months.
• Nine countries in the AdMob network generated more than one billion monthly ad requests in December 2010, up from one country just a year ago.
• The 10 countries in Western Europe with the most ad requests all experienced a greater than 400% growth in ad requests in 2010.
• More than half of AdMob's top 50 brand advertising campaigns in December 2010 used the AdMob Interstitial Ad Unit (NEW)
• Ad Impressions for AdMob grew more than 500% in the past year from the AdMob Interstitial Ad Unit (NEW)
• There are now over 50,000 publishers in the AdMob network that support their mobile businesses with mobile advertising (NEW)
• Hundreds of mobile publishers, including Angry Birds, are earning over $100,000 per month from AdMob ads.

AdMob’s growth is a reflection of our advertisers’ and publishers’ success with mobile display advertising.  

Here’s an example of how AdMob is helping to generate great results for our clients.  As part of their effort to promote their new S60, Volvo and their mobile agency, Mobext, the mobile marketing arm for Media Contacts and MPG, worked with AdMob to develop new rich media ad units. Volvo included a great video interstitial (check it out below) and an engaging, easy to navigate mobile website, and was able to accomplish their marketing goals as a result.

The results speak for themselves.  Volvo’s cross-platform campaign saw CTRs of 3.91%, and after the campaign, users expressed a 240% increase in brand favorability, 88% increase in purchase intent, and a 78% increase in recommendation intent.  More importantly, this campaign changed the way the car-maker has approached mobile marketing, in general.  According to Linda Gangeri, Manager, National Advertising, Volvo,

"The interactive video ads encouraged deep consumer engagement and higher response rates compared to other media running during this same time. With the proliferation of smartphone devices, this is an area that we'll continue to invest in and expect to see continued growth."

That display campaigns like Volvo’s, sophisticated by desktop standards, are now running on mobile, is a very significant development, and reminds us how much progress mobile advertising has made.  It also inspires us to keep innovating; no matter how far mobile advertising has come, we’ve still only scratched the surface.

Jason Spero, Director, Mobile

We've been doing some work in the UK to promote the woZZon mobile application to Android users that highlights how geo-targeting can provide great returns for advertisers. WoZZon is one of the UK's largest events listings database, providing information on films, theatre, concerts, exhibitions, comedy, clubs, dance, opera, family days out and community events.

To demonstrate woZZon's insight into local events across the UK, woZZon teamed up with digital agency Yodel to develop a location-based mobile advertising campaign running on popular Android applications on our network. Together, we created geo-targeted regional banner ads offering city-specific messages for users in seven major UK cities. For example – ‘Free app for movies in London’ or 'Fancy a day out in Manchester?'

For Android users outside of these cities, a slightly more generic banner ad was displayed, such as ‘Free app for local concerts'. To find out more about the woZZon application and to download it, users simply had to click on the banner and they were taken directly through to the download page.

click to enlarge image

This highly-targeted location-based approach meant that woZZon was able to identify areas across the UK where the app was particularly popular and focus its ad spend accordingly. Taking this geo-located approach also helped to increase downloads significantly. The localised ads were found to generate CTR and CTD rates that were 85 percent higher than those achieved by the more generic nationwide ads.

Before the launch of the mobile advertising campaign, the woZZon app was 89th in the Android UK download charts. Once the campaign kicked off, the app quickly jumped up to 11th in the travel download chart. It remained in the Top 15 throughout the course of the month. As a result, woZZon is experiencing more than double the amount of daily downloads than prior to the launch of the campaign. To learn more about woZZon, please download the full case study pdf.

Posted by Matt Brocklehurst, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

Last week, we shared in the regional breakdown for the 2 billion daily ad requests on the AdMob network.  As shown in the data, the rapid growth that we highlighted is not restricted to any one country or market. Throughout this quarter, we’ll be posting perspectives from different markets to learn about unique country trends, challenges and opportunities in mobile.

This week we have a guest post from Peter Fernandez, who leads mobile advertising partnerships for Latin America across the Google Mobile Ads and AdMob products, on his perspective on the latest mobile trends in Brazil.

Brazil has one of the largest populations of mobile phone users in the world and last year we saw a significant increase in the number of Brazilians accessing the Internet on these devices.  This is likely driven by operator investments in infrastructure and significant price drops in mobile data prices, including pre-paid services.  For the first time, operators have seen revenue from data plans exceed revenue from messaging services.  Given that less than a quarter of Brazilian households have fixed broadband access, mobile is poised to become an important Internet access point in the future.

What are these millions of Brazilians doing when they connect to the mobile Internet? In just the past year Google mobile search traffic in Brazil has increased over 500%, whereas Google mobile search traffic has grown over 5x globally in the last two years.  Similarly, we’ve seen an 1251% increase in ad requests on our AdMob display network in the last year.  The usage is not restricted by device types either. The majority of Brazil’s mobile subscribers own feature (WAP) phones, and a lot of the growth we’re seeing is coming from these devices.  However, high end devices such as those running the Android and iOS operating systems are growing quickly as well in terms of both ad requests and unique users.

Application developers are playing a big role in driving Brazil’s fast growth in mobile Internet usage by creating the compelling mobile content that these millions of consumers are engaging with everyday.  Last year, we saw tremendous interest from the local, vibrant developer community when we hosted our largest ever Google Developer Day in Sao Paulo.  Hundreds of Brazilian app developers are using mobile advertising to grow their businesses, such as Best, Cool & Fun Games who saw a tenfold increase in revenue from mobile advertising in 2010.  We are thrilled with this success and are excited to continue helping developers build a business on mobile.

As more Brazilian consumers spend more time on their mobile devices, advertisers need to think about how they should tailor their marketing to reach this growing mobile audience.  Today, advertisers can reach millions of users in Brazil who are searching on Google from their mobile devices.  To connect with these consumers, there are three things that advertisers should focus on when going mobile:

1. Create separate mobile campaigns.  The first step to reaching mobile users is to separate mobile ad campaigns from desktop campaigns - globally we've seen that these campaigns perform better because advertisers have more control over their bids and budgets and can make better use of mobile-specific ad features.
   
   
2. Optimize landing page experience.  Advertisers need to be sure that their landing pages are optimized for mobile. They can do this by either creating a new mobile landing page or making sure their desktop pages render well on the mobile screen.
   
   
3. Don’t forget about feature (WAP) phones.  Much of the growth in 2010 came from mobile users who are searching on feature phones.  Be sure that you are reaching these users by creating WAP mobile search ads for your mobile campaigns.

While we are thrilled about the mobile growth that we saw in 2010, we think that 2011 will be even more impressive for Brazil.  To learn more about our advertising solutions or about how to earn money from mobile advertising, visit www.google.com/mobileads. 

Posted by Peter Fernandez, Mobile Sales Lead for Latin America

Back in October we announced Google Boost, a new advertising solution to help local businesses connect with potential customers in their area.  Today we are excited to announce that Boost ads can appear on Google Search results pages on Android and iPhone devices.

Consumers increasingly use mobile devices to search for products and services, and Boost will give advertisers the opportunity to reach these customers exactly when they are looking for local businesses on their phones.  This feature will automatically take effect for current and future Boost advertisers.

click to enlarge image

In case you aren’t familiar with Boost, it’s Google's new advertising product that helps business owners quickly create an online advertising campaign that targets local customers.  Using information from the business’s free Google Places listing, Boost automatically suggests and creates text ads that appear on Google Search and Google Maps results pages.

Google Boost is now available in all U.S. cities to select business types.  To find out if your business is eligible, sign in to your Places account (or create a free one if you haven’t yet) and visit the Dashboard.  If Boost is not currently available to your business, fill out this short form and we’ll notify you when it is.

Posted by Kiley McEvoy, Product Manager