Now that the final days of summer have come to an end, retailers are in the thick of planning for the busy holiday shopping season.  As you start to plan your campaigns, it's important to take a step back and look at how consumers are using their mobile and tablet devices to drive in-store and on-device purchases.  Here are a few insights that may surprise you:

• We project that this year 15% of total “Black Friday” searches will be from mobile devices based on historical growth rates.
• Many advertisers do not realize that mobile users actively search for last minute holiday gifts and to locate stores to purchase these last minute gifts.  In fact, we project that 44% of total searches for last minute gifts and store locator terms will be from mobile devices this holiday season based on historical growth rates.  
• In fact, looking back on the past two holiday seasons, we see a “double peak” in search volumes for retail brands around first Black Friday and then the week before Christmas as mobile users locate stores for last minute shopping.  These shoppers may have missed the deadline for free shipping and are motivated to locate and shop at brick and mortar locations.  Here is the data from the holiday season in 2009 & 2010 showing this double peak:

• The important thing to keep in mind is that these mobile searches drive in-store purchases: 65% of high end device users report that they have used their device to find a business, and then made a purchase at that business in person according our holiday retail survey of users in the AdMob network.
• Retailers should be sure to plan for the tablet audience when it comes to driving on-device conversions.  Ebay has stated that tablet users spend 50% more than PC users, have higher AOV, and have higher or equivalent conversion rates.
• According to our survey, greater than 33% of both smartphone users and tablet users plan to start their shopping before Thanksgiving, so smart marketers will start their campaigns early this year to reach these consumers.

Whether your goals are branding or direct response, Google Mobile Ads can help you with strategies to reach and engage your target audience and drive customers to convert on tablets, on mobile devices, and in your stores.  Contact your Google Mobile Ads sales representative to learn more.

Posted by Johanna Werther, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Between AdMob, which we acquired last year, and Google AdSense, we help mobile publishers make money and grow their businesses through ad-funded apps and web content. Some of our customers have asked us whether they should use AdMob or AdSense, since there's some overlap between the two. Our teams have been working hard to combine the best of both products and make life simple and seamless for our customers, while making sure we have a broad range of products and features to suit all our customers' needs.

Earlier this year, for example, all AdSense for Mobile Applications beta participants switched to AdMob, which is now our primary, specialized solution for app developers.

We're now pleased to offer a unified, specialized service for mobile web site publishers – AdSense, which we encourage AdMob mobile web publishers to move to. AdMob support for older WAP mobile web sites will stop on September 30. For sites and ads made to be viewed on high-end devices (like iPhones and Android phones), the AdMob product will be around for a little longer, but we wanted to give mobile web publishers plenty of time to start the transition.

The net result of all this is that if you're an app developer, AdMob is your solution for monetizing, measuring, and promoting your mobile apps. If you're a mobile web publisher, AdSense can help you monetize your mobile web content, and you can get started here. (If you're an AdMob advertiser who wants to reach users on WAP mobile devices, AdWords can help you reach hundreds of millions of users across the Google Display Network.

We know that these sorts of transitions can cause our customers some extra work, but we are absolutely confident that by having products to suit the specific needs of app developers and web publishers we’ll be able to offer the best technology and reporting, the easiest to use tools, the highest quality ads, and the most revenue possible.

Mobile advertising is evolving at lightning speed, and our engineers have been working at the same pace to help drive the growth of our clients' mobile businesses: we released new tablet user experiences, targeting options and creative formats; we announced integrations between AdMob and the DoubleClick products with rich media ad serving into apps and mobile support in DFP Small Business. We even tried to push the boundaries of what's possible with mobile rich media with our innovative "Uncover Your World" campaign.

We're excited about partnering with you on this journey, and have a lot more coming soon. Stay tuned.


Posted by Clay Bavor, Product Management Director, Mobile Ads

Here on the Google mobile ads team, we’re big fans of pushing the limits of what’s possible with our products. So when we were thinking about the best way to promote the Google Search app on iPhone, we wanted to see what we could do with the latest in AdMob rich media.

The answer, it turned out, was a whole lot. We worked closely with our marketing team and its agency, Grow Interactive, to create “Uncover Your World,” an interactive mobile experience that takes full advantage of AdMob’s rich media capabilities.

Here’s a preview:

(l-r): User clicks on an in-app animated HTML5 banner; They watch an in-line intro video; While exploring the ad, users can unlock secret games

And here’s a video where you can see how the ad actually works:

“Uncover Your World” invites you to explore a virtual cityscape and learn via a self-paced storyline how the Google Search app can “uncover” facts about the world around you with features like search with your voice and search with your phone’s camera. We highlighted this functionality by combining many of AdMob’s custom rich media features, including:

• Animated HTML5 banners
• Interactive HTML5 interstitials and expandables
• Extensive video content
• In-line video and audio, so the users stay within the ad while experiencing sight, sound and motion instead of being directed to the phone’s media player (e.g., Quicktime for iPhone)
• Unlockable games where users tap, touch, and tilt to play

The preliminary results of the campaign have been impressive. On average, users spend over a minute and a half interacting with the ad, and of those, 50% go on directly from the ad to download the app.

As excited as we are about these results, we’re even more excited to see how “the pros” – our advertisers and their creative agencies – make use of the technologies behind the “Uncover Your World” campaign. As the campaign showed, the tools are all now there to build really innovative new mobile experiences that make use of the touchscreen, location, audio, video, interactivity, and more.

Designers... start your engines!

Posted by Clay Bavor, Product Management Director, Mobile Ads

Update: You can also view the ad experience directly at http://www.uncoveryourworld.com on your iPhone browser.

We recently went out into the streets of Seoul and looked around for people with smartphones in their hands - it wasn’t hard - and asked them questions about how they use their smartphone, how often they use it and what their life would be like without it. We heard from people young and old, and their answers were unsurprisingly consistent: they can barely imagine life without their smartphones.

We thought the video would be interesting to a global audience interested in the changing dynamics of a fast-growing Asian economy, so we subtitled the video in English for you:
 

We also recently completed a study, in collaboration with Ipsos, of over 1,000 South Korean smartphone users and found some of the following stats to be interesting:

• 100% of South Koreans have a mobile phone, 27% of them smartphones. This smartphone penetration is higher than countries such as Germany, Italy, Taiwan and Russia, and comparable to the U.S., France, and the UK.
• 85% of smartphone users report that this is their first smartphone, one of the highest proportions of any country in the world that we studied.
• South Korean smartphone users report an average of 42 apps downloaded on their phone, the second highest # of any country for which we currently have results.
• 72% are using search on their smartphones on a daily basis, one of the top 3 countries out of the 30 we studied.
• Koreans are more likely to say they’ve used their smartphone at home (98%) than on the go (90%) or at work (79%) showing that the smartphone is a primary, not just supplementary, gateway to the internet.

We’ll be making many more statistics on Korean smartphone users publicly available for your own analysis within the next few weeks - including mobile search, video, social networking, mobile advertising attitudes and more - so stay tuned.

Ryan Hayward, Product Marketing Manager, Google Asia-Pacific

One of the easiest ways to receive a quick answer on the go is by clicking on a number from your phone and calling a business directly.  In fact, we’re seeing users make millions of calls a month through AdWords Call Extensions; advertisers display their national or local number in an ad and receive detailed reporting on these calls to help inform marketing decisions.  

But what happens for phone numbers that are entered in an ad, but not via a clickable Call Extension? Previously our system wasn’t able to provide separate reporting for clicks to phone numbers from a URL click so these numbers were not clickable. Now advertisers can view detailed reporting on click-to-call activity by segmenting traffic by click type. As a result, we will be making an upcoming change to ads where any phone number in an ad will be clickable on a mobile device.  

(Left): Previously, numbers in ad were non-clickable and customers users couldn’t directly call a business from the ad.

(Right): Now, phone numbers in ad text will become clickable. Users can call a business directly from an ad, and full AdWords reporting is available for all calls placed.

Calls stemming from clicks to these numbers will now be the same cost as a click to your website. Moreover,  potential customers are now able to click on your number while on their mobile devices, and you’ll be able to leverage the power of Adwords reporting by segmenting your campaign reports by click type. 

However, to get the most value from click-to-call, we recommend that you remove your phone number from your ad creative and manually create a Call Extension.  There are two primary benefits to this. First, your number will appear as an additional line of ad text which frees up space in your ad creative for other messages. In addition, you’re able to take advantage of other powerful enhancements such as Vanity Numbers, call-only creatives, and Call Metrics reporting. To get started with these call based features, visit the ‘Ad Extensions’ tab in your account to create your first Call Extension . 

We are committed to providing our users with the best mobile web experience and encourage you to learn more about the different ways you can connect with customers via the phone by visiting our Help Center.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Product Manager, Mobile Ads

If you missed out on the action at our recent sell-out Think Mobile event in London you can still get your hands on the highlights from the day. This is the fourth and last in a series of blog posts where we summarise key points and include video footage from the thought leaders who presented their insights during the sell-out event.

“It’s not a debate anymore about mobile website or apps,” announced Rob Define, ebookers’ Director of Product Strategy, at our recent Think Mobile event. “You need to have both.” 

The online travel company’s slogan is “book easier. travel happier”, and so to fulfil the dual components of their promise they adopted a two-pronged approach in entering the mobile space.  

To help customers “book easier”, last January ebookers launched the first fully transactional multi-product mobile site of any online travel agency in Europe. “What we wanted was really to have 100% the same product that we have on desktop,” said Rob. This meant the mobile site offered a lower cost, faster development time and more straightforward support than an app. Based on the experience of their US-based sister company Orbitz, ebookers also knew that a mobile website would bring more bookings than an app. “As an e-commerce transactional website, we wanted to drive through bookings first.”



The second part of ebookers’ mobile strategy was to help clients “travel happier”. “We did that by launching the ebookersExplorer iPad app in May,” Rob revealed. Mashing together content from several social media sites to create a dynamic travel magazine, the app set out to build customer value and brand awareness through differentiation, and to focus on innovation and inspiration rather than just transactions. 

While in the early days of smartphones customers could visit the ebookers desktop site via their mobiles, since launching their mobile site ebookers experienced a 90% jump in visitors and bookings via mobile during the first five months after launch. Rob’s advice for replicating results like these? For both mobile sites and apps, he counsels companies to “advertise and analyse to succeed”.

Rob reports that organic and paid search drive a high share of visitors to the site, so he recommends a dedicated mobile pay-per-click account to manage all-important positioning. Introducing mobile-targeted ad text is another top tip; ebookers trialled text borrowed from their desktop campaigns against mobile-specific text and saw the latter deliver increases in click-through rates of up to 25%.

Meanwhile to promote the app, the team enlisted the help of AdMob. “We launched an iPad-targeted specific campaign in all 12 countries where ebookers is present in Europe,” Rob says. “As soon as we launched this campaign we saw a 100% increase in downloads of the app, which is phenomenal.” 

Curious to know more? Read the full case study on ebookers’ mobile success here see Rob at Think Mobile presenting here and interviewed here .

Posted by Matt Brocklehurst, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

In late May, Google announced a beta launch that enables rich media ads to be served from DoubleClick into mobile apps in the AdMob network.

Google selected Intel and OMD as the first advertiser-agency team to test this capability in June. As part of this test, Intel served one million rich media impressions from DoubleClick into the AdMob network. The rich media ads were banner-initiated interstitials that featured additional calls to actions such as playing a video or visiting the mobile site to learn more.
 


As it turned out, the test proved successful from an ad serving perspective as the variance in reported impressions between AdMob and DoubleClick were in line and compliant with industry standards.

Since the mobile campaign was served from DoubleClick, Intel and OMD could understand their campaign’s performance across an expanded set of ad metrics, including:

• Engagement rate: the rate at which users engaged with the ad, whether it be tapping to play the ad’s video or visit a site.
• Average display time: the average time in seconds that each rich media ad is displayed to users
• Midpoint and complete video plays: a measure of how much of the video was viewed, including up to the midpoint of the video or to the video’s end.

Based on these metrics, Intel’s rich media campaign proved highly successful in engaging users:

• 19.5% engagement rate
• 15+ seconds average display time; 3x longer than average DoubleClick rich media campaigns.
• 1 of 4 video plays lasted to at least the mid-point of the video.

For OMD, DoubleClick-served rich media into mobile is a big step forward. According to Amit Prakash, Director of Analytics at OMD, “Getting DoubleClick to serve rich media into AdMob mobile apps is a huge win for advertisers. This really helps bring down the complexity of working in mobile. DoubleClick platform can now be utilized to build, host, serve mobile ads that we’re already using for digital.”

In light of the compelling results of this first test, Google will be opening this beta to another handful of advertisers over the coming weeks.

Posted by Ben Chung, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads