Welcome to the latest post in our Mobile Insights series featuring expert views from our mobile ads team. This week’s guest contributors are Alex Barza and Kacy Brod, who lead our U.S. mobile efforts for Retail. Here are their thoughts on the state of mobile marketing in retail gleaned from Think Retail 2011, Google’s annual gathering of retail executives. At this year’s Think Retail event in Mountain View, mobile marketing was a hot topic. We started the day by summarizing the most interesting retail insights from a recently conducted 5,000 person mobile survey (watch the three minute highlight video). We also noted that last year our #1 recommendation to retailers was to create mobile-optimized sites and/or apps. After a quick survey of Internet Retailer’s top 100 ranked companies, we’re happy to report the majority now have created one or both.
After speaking with many retailers and analyzing our own retail data, we identified six trends and recommendations around each to help retailers evolve their mobile strategies.
#1 -- Mobile Is Highly Engaging: There’s no other platform that can allow you to touch and engage with a product or brand like mobile can, so intrigue users to interact with your advertising campaign. Invite them to swipe, rotate, tell their own story, or upload their own personal video: the sky’s the limit. The Gilt Groupe, for instance, ran a iPad Rich Media Interstitial ad that lets users interact with multiple product images by swiping and enlarging the images in an interactive manner. Users simply tap or pinch-out and, in this case, have the option to download the app directly from the Apple Marketplace.
Recommendation: Tie mobile into other branding and channel marketing strategies and look at tapping into Mobile's unique native features to further engage customers.
#2 -- Local Drives Business: We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: we believe in local search. The most popular mobile shopping activity is locating the nearest retailer. When consumers find local information, 88% take action within a day; of this number, 61% call a retailer and 59% visit a store. (1)
Recommendation: Be discoverable and drive store foot traffic when consumers are searching for your business, products, or services. Integrate store locatiors into your display campaigns to help your customers find stores nearest to them. #3 -- Consumers Want Offers: Google research shows that 70% of consumers use their smartphones while shopping. Why? Consumers love to compare prices while in a store. When we analyzed last year’s holiday search trends, we found a 250% increase over the previous year in searches related to offers and deals. Recommendation: Use Ads with Offers and mobile coupons in both search and display to drive consumers into your stores and keep them there while they are comparison shopping. Include mobile to distribute promotional offers and time-sensitive coupons and designate custom mobile codes to track the return on your ad spend.
Both display and search ads deliver returns for retailers
#4 -- Consumers Engage with Mobile on Multiple Platforms:More than 165 million tablets are expected to ship in the next two years, and according to eMarketer, 41% of people say shopping is their sole purpose for buying a tablet. As a result we’ve noticed a big surge in search on tablets which has prompted us to completely redesign and optimize the tablet search results page for a touch interface. This means retailers need to have a cross-platform strategy which includes tablets.
Recommendation: Test new ad formats and redesign experiences specifically for different types of devices. Target tablets within your existing desktop search campaigns or break them out to ensure appropriate coverage, especially during this holiday season. Reach the tablet customer via new rich media ad templates that make it easy to execute a rich user experience resulting in extremely high engagement. These templates take advantage of tablets’ larger screen sizes, high-res graphics, touch screens and multimedia capabilities to drive deep engagement with mobile audiences. Take a look at our launch partner video here! #5 -- Mobile Is Incremental: Fifteen percent of all shopping-related searches are now on a mobile device. This spells opportunity for retailers to tap into search growth by specifically targeting mobile devices and tablets. When one advertising agency expanded their client’s business onto mobile, they saw some unexpected but very interesting behaviors. 20% of clients who conducted research on the desktop finalized their purchases on mobile devices. Seeing this incredible crossover data, they invested in mobile search advertising by leveraging Google’s Click-to-call ads to drive traffic to their call centers and also sent mobile users to an easy to use two-step ordering process on mobile and tablet sites. This investment led to a large increase of new prospects and also lowered the cost of a sale by 25% when occurring on mobile versus the call center. This is just one example of what can be achieved.
Recommendation: We see huge search spikes during the holiday season, as the above shopping query trend graph illustrates. In fact, last year Google saw a 250% increase on Black Friday related queries vs 2009 during the week of Black Friday and we’re hoping for another banner year for mobile. This is a valuable time to get in front of consumers, so have specific mobile holiday strategies in place and establish appropriate budgets. Below are two examples of how Target and Home Depot used Black Friday messaging during the week of Black Friday to capture the increased demand.
#6 -- A Word On Measurement: Mobile acts as a bridge and impacts your in-store and online channels. The opportunity is huge, but it requires innovative thinking, adapting to new realities, and challenging the assumed models. Our research shows that when consumers make purchases as a result of research conducted on their phones, 76% purchase in-store and 59% purchase online, while a smaller portion purchase on their phones. Recommendation: Measure mobile differently; don’t measure success solely on mobile sales broadly. Think of conversions differently -- metrics such as a store look-up, customer sign-up, redemption of an offer in store, or app downloads are important. Tablets, on the other hand, have shown very strong eCommerce ROI, especially in retail, and can be measured more like desktop. To learn more about the above recommendations, download the Full Think Retail Mobile Deck here. For a quick snapshot of what’s available for retail in mobile now, check out our retail sizzle video. Posted by: Alex Barza, Senior Account Executive, Mobile & Kacy Brod, Mobile Head of Display, Retail
With the tag line “So Many Ways to Play,” LEGO’s popular DUPLO Games are exciting play activities aimed at children ages 18 months through 5 years. The bricks and games, first introduced in 1969, have been developed to help and support children in discovering shapes, sizes, colors, and more. They range from DUPLO bricks, or building blocks, to engaging game sets based on characters and themes as diverse as Winnie the Pooh, police & fire, farm, castle, and zoo.
Capitalizing on mobile popularity
When LEGO sought to increase awareness and sales of the DUPLO bricks and sets, marketers at the company wanted to take a new tack at reaching parents with young children, by extending the reach of their digital advertising to the mobile audience. They also sought to create a more immersive, interactive experience to draw in viewers using both traditional and interactive video – all delivered on any mobile screen via Google’s Mobile Ads network. “We saw mobile video advertising as an untapped opportunity and one of the best ways to reach users across mobile platforms,” says Ms. Tan Lee Hoon, Managing Director, LEGO Singapore Pte Ltd.
Ms. Tan and her team launched a cost-per-click mobile banner ad campaign through AdMob. Users who clicked on the banner were taken to a mobile-optimized landing page where they could click to watch the video. The LEGO marketing team also mobilized a CPM-focused campaign using banner ads and interactive and pre-roll video ad units.
Fully immersive ads that get noticed
LEGO saw a 1% click-through rate on the banners taking users to the mobile-optimized page and a 1.3% click-through rate on the banner ads leading viewers to the interactive video. User engagement on the interactive video ad units was exceptional. In fact, 10.65% of users clicked on the “Learn More” button to obtain more information and spent an average of 23 seconds watching the 30 second video.
Posted by Christian Cadeo, Head of Mobile, Southeast Asia
Well known brands in Australia have been making a full leap into mobile marketing in 2011, with a variety of campaign strategies including app download promotion, video, click to call functionality & more. We thought we’d share a highlight reel of some of the most interesting campaigns so far this year:
And here’s a quick description of each campaign:
Telstra: Used in-app banners to click through to a mobile optimised video, detailing their home media offerings.
Disney: Also used click-to-video functionality to promote the DVD release of the hit movie, Tron.
Qantas: Used in-app banners to direct users to their new, mobile optimised, boarding pass facilities.
Vodafone: promoted their double minutes for free campaign, through in-app banners, and a mobile website.
Domino’s: promoted their new mobile ordering functionality, with in-app banners
Lexus: gained consumer engagement by directing users to the app download of their new Lexus CT City Challenge iPhone game.
eBay: Prompted users to experience mobile commerce through the download of their mobile app.
MLC: Prompted users to click to call to book a free 30 minute consultation.
Stay tuned, this is just the start, and there’s much more to come in 2011.
Posted by Mike Kofi Okyere, Google Mobile Ads, Australia
Today our Global Perspectives series focuses on the extraordinary growth of smartphone usage in the UK mobile marketplace and what this tells us about the current state of mobile advertising. At our recent Think Mobile event in London we shared some of the findings from our research into the mobile market. Here for the first time we share the in-depth results, including a video and report as well as the latest AdMob data on the UK.
AdMob activity shows UK mobile market booming The AdMob network, that includes over 89,000 websites and apps worldwide, provides insight into the current trends on UK mobile usage. We see that over the past year the uptake of smartphones in the UK has been quite staggering. According to figures from ComScore, Smartphone ownership was up 58% year-on-year to 36% of the UK.With the AdMob network recording over 100 million ad requests a day and over 3 billion ad requests each month, the UK display ads market is clearly in the rudest of health.
So what are people in the UK using their smartphones for? Our research into uk consumers’ mobile activities shows that many are using their smartphones to discover information with, for example, 76% having browsed the internet; 52% in the last week. They’re also in the habit of using their smartphones at the same time that they’re using other media, including TV: 53% of people in the UK use their smartphone while also watching TV programmes.
Purchase driven shoppers
45% of UK smartphone owners use it to help with shopping, 28% use them to look for inspiration while shopping and 15% use a phone to evaluate products while shopping. Smartphone research frequently leads to sales either on the phone, in-store or via desktop PC as the chart below shows.
Local information seekers UK smartphone users are most interested in what’s in their our own backyards; 81% of the time they’re looking for local information when they search, while 80% have reached out to a local business after a search on their phone with a third of these going on to purchase.
Reaching the mobile user Our research shows that 87% of people notice mobile ads and 28% of people have taken action after seeing a mobile ad. Of those, 16% make a purchase in a shop, 20% buy on a computer and 9% complete a transaction via mobile phone.
What next? When it comes to mobile advertising and commerce, it seems that there’s still plenty of room for growth and development. Our research found that 83% of top advertisers in Britain don’t have a mobile-optimised site. Clearly, it’s still not too late to be early in mobile. Keen to learn more about the state of mobile in the UK? Watch our new video on the mobile movement in the UK here, download the reporthere or if you missed our Think Mobile UK event, check out Ian Carrington of Google presenting some of the research highlights here.
Posted by Matt Brocklehurst, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads UK
If you've taken the time to build a site designed specifically for mobile, we want to hear from you! At Google, we believe that building a mobile-ready site is critical for businesses of all sizes and we’re looking for some great examples. We’d love to hear about what you’ve done, how you did it, and the success you‘ve seen. Please fill out this form and tell us about your mobile site. We’ll spotlight some of the best submissions in case studies. If selected, you can tout your success and spread the word about your truly great mobile site experience. Think you’ve got what it takes? We hope so! Here’s the kind of info we’re looking for about your successful mobile site:
Your strategy for success (simple layout? prioritized content?)
What you learned along the way (experiments? trial and error?)
Metrics that show how far you’ve come (numbers tell the tale!)
Why your mobile site works and what advice you have for others
If you’ve got a mobile site success story to share, fill out this form to tell us about it and you may be featured by Google for being an innovator in the mobile space. If you’re still working toward mobilizing your site, we’ve got the resources to help you get from here to there (and everywhere that mobile goes). Use ourMobile Site Builder to build your site, or learn from ourMobile Website Best Practices. Posted by Adam Compain, Mobile Specialist, Mobile Ads
This is the first in a series of posts capturing insights from the Think Mobile event in London. Google’s recent Think Mobile event in London hosted a capacity crowd of over 400 delegates, with a further 9,500-plus viewers streaming it live on desktop and mobiles. This is the first in a series of four blog posts where we’ll summarise key points and include video footage from the thought leaders who presented. For a sneak preview, check out the three-minute summary from Google UK MD Matt Brittin here that finished the day on a real high. Ian Carrington of Google took the prize for sharing “killer stats” at Think Mobile UK as he highlighted data on just how fast the mobile market is developing:
In 2010 there were 500 million people connected to the mobile web, today there are around a billion.
In the middle of last year, Wall Street tech futurist Mary Meeker predicted that smartphone sales would overtake PC sales by the end of 2012. That in fact already happened in Q4 2010 – fully two years earlier than expected.
Ian also announced some of the results of Google’s research (we’ll soon be sharing the full report with you on this blog) in the UK with notable stats including 44% of us go to bed with our phones within arm’s reach, 65% of us use our smartphones to kill time commuting and 91% of us use our smartphones during downtime in the workplace.
Smartphone usage is clearly booming in the UK. However, only 17% of advertisers today have a mobile optimised site. “This is the single largest barrier between you and the mobile user,” Ian announced, adding “it’s time for a little less conversation and a little more action.”:
Step one: develop and integrate your mobile strategy Start off by finding out what your objectives are. “Is it about downloads? Is it about customer acquisition? What are you trying to achieve? Once you’ve defined that, integrate it into all your other marketing activities”
Step two: build your mobile destination This could be a website or an iPhone or Android app. To show just how much this step is worthy of your investment, Ian pointed to Ebay. “They’re having a sale on a mobile device every single second, and they’re doing over $2bn worth of revenue in a year on mobile. In actual fact, they sell three to four Ferraris per month via a mobile phone!” he said.
Step three: connect with your users “People are looking at your business through a mobile lens,” he continued. “Are you optimising your advertising campaign? Have you separated out your AdWord campaigns to target desktop customers in a different way with different bidding strategies to your mobile customers?” If you’ve answered “no” then it’s time to consider making these changes.
Step four: mobilise your business with data “Be creative with the data you’ve got,” Ian advised. “You’ve got all this data from your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts on what people are doing today with your business on a mobile phone. Very, very few people are actually looking at that data – so start looking at it and understand the insights it’s giving you.” These valuable details can directly inform step one – your strategy.
Get more “killer stats” and insights by watching Ian’s talk here and look out for three more blogs on the key takeaways from Think Mobile UK.
Posted by Matt Brocklehurst, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads UK
Mobile has finally delivered on its promise and it’s transforming our lives in almost every way, connecting our physical and digital worlds.Smartphones are driving an explosion of the mobile web. Check out the video below and learn about five trends we’re seeing in mobile. As marketers, you’ll need to take action, so stay with us through the end for some key steps to get started on mobile today. Why is going mobile important?
85% of mobile devices will be web enabled by next year.
Mobile search has grown 4x in the past year.
1 in 3 mobile searches have local intent.
30% of restaurant searches are from mobile devices.
It’s time to use mobile to your advantage. And it’s not too late to be early. Hungry for more data? Check out our new mobile insights page. Posted by Suzanne Mumford, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads
