With 20 million smartphones in Italy and an increase of 52% compared to 2010 (Nielsen, Q1 2011), smartphones are radically changing interactions between businesses and consumers. However, most companies have not yet adapted their digital strategy for the mobile world. This is why two weeks ago we gathered more than 700 executives and developers from the mobile ecosystem in Italy for Think Mobile in Milan.

Partner panel with Citroen, Wind, Unicredit, Fiat and Digitouch sharing their mobile strategies at Think Mobile Italy.

During the panel on mobile strategies, several partners highlighted the fact that you need to be mobile ready now. Vittorio Veltroni, General Director, Digital Division, at Mondadori states that mobile is no longer a space for experiments for the industry. For Fiat, Maurizio Spagnulo, Marketing Communication Director, clarifies that mobile gives them the opportunity to be close to their customers 24/7.

For mobile advertising, Italy leads globally with Italians having a high awareness of mobile ads; 72% of Italian smartphone users notice mobile advertising with search engines and video websites having the highest advertising recall (Ipsos GmbH & TNS Infratest). In addition, half of these users actually perform an action after seeing the ad. On an overall level, Italy has one of the highest acceptance rates of mobile ads by users with 37% open to receiving ads on their smartphone.

Italy with highest acceptance of mobile ads

M-commerce is already a reality in Italy; 23% of smartphone owners said they had already made a purchase via mobile and Italy together with Japan are among the major markets globally with highest expected increase in mobile purchase in the next 12 months. As innovative developers are key to driving m-commerce, at Think Mobile we hosted specific sessions to grow the local developer community with more than 250 Italian mobile developers attending. To promote mobile app creation, we launched the Guide to the App Galaxy in Italian with a local case study from Il Meteo.

Are you ready to go mobile in Italy? Find out how to with the presentations and videos from Think Mobile Italy.

Posted by Frank Albert Coates, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads & Dario Mancini, Country Head Mobile Sales Italy

We recently launched new consumer and advertising research that demonstrates why brands should extend their marketing across all screens -- TVs, PCs, phones and tablets.

We’re excited to share details on a recent success story that demonstrates how brands can shine with multi-screen branding. Reebok wanted to promote the launch of its new lineup of lightweight, high-performance shoes, RealFlex.

Reebok’s agency, Carat, worked with Google to extend Reebok video creatives across all digital platforms and drive branding across YouTube for PC & Mobile, and mobile rich media on AdMob. In addition to driving awareness and engagement, Reebok drove conversions with savvy targeting levers such as contextual targeting and remarketing.

The multi-screen approach yielded impressive results:

• YouTube masthead ads led to 131% lift in brand conversions (i.e., site visits and searches for Reebok brand)
• YouTube In-Stream ads resulted in interaction rates 27% higher than Reebok’s internal benchmarks
• AdMob tablet rich media led to interactions rates 5x higher than Reebok’s internal benchmarks
• Contextual targeting on the Google Display Network led to CTRs 9x Reebok’s internal benchmarks

Check out this video to learn more and see how Reebok successfully adapted its TV creatives across digital platforms.

Posted by Ben Chung, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

We caught up with Rachel Pasqua of iCrossing to discuss her clients’ increasingly strong interest in mobile search marketing, as well as trends in mobile content development.

is a global agency that helps CMOs build connected brands. The company recently expanded its presence to Latin America and Spain with the acquisition of Wallaby Group, rebranded as iCrossing Latin America/Spain. And in 2011, Melissa Parrish of Forrester Research cited iCrossing’s mobile advertising capabilities in the May 16 report, Agencies Deliver Strategic Mobile Display Expertise.

As VP of Mobile, Rachel Pasqua works closely with iCrossing’s clients to guide their mobile search and display strategies. She has offered to share insight on what’s working and the many options brands now have for making the most of mobile:

Google Mobile Ads (GMA): What mobile changes and trends have you seen with your clients in the past year?
Rachel Pasqua (RP): Every year, mobile becomes more and more important to our business and the brands we work with. 2011 definitely represented a leap forward with the momentum gained for mobile. At the beginning of 2010, most of our clients saw roughly 10% of their overall site traffic coming from mobile devices -- and about 50% of that mobile traffic came from smartphones (mostly from the iPhone). Fast-forward to today, and most of our clients across all verticals see about 20% of their traffic coming from mobile devices, and the majority of those devices consist of high-end smartphones and tablets.

The acceleration in traffic has pushed mobile much higher up on our clients’ agendas. Mobile users are arriving in greater numbers, spending more time and performing more key actions than ever before. Clients are looking at these factors and 50% growth of mobile traffic over the past 18 months and realizing that it’s critical to support their customers on their platforms of choice - desktop AND mobile. Many of them are turning to us for help in building their mobile web sites but what we find most interesting is that even more of them are asking us to help them figure out their mobile strategy - web, apps, search and everything in between.

Almost every single client is running mobile search campaigns. The clients with mobile sites and mobile apps are investing significantly - it’s not just small test budgets anymore. Our clients are embracing mobile as a source of creating compelling content and, as a result, are focused on developing marketing content for smartphone browsers and for tablets as well.

GMA: How are your clients tackling the challenge of creating mobile content?
RP: From iCrossing’s perspective, the two main options a client has are hosted sites, third party platforms that render a mobile version of your .com site and integrated sites, an approach wherein the existing .com CMS is used to render mobile content.

The easiest and quickest option is to work with an external, hosted mobile web platform. These vendors usually offer a reverse proxy service that mobilizes your existing web site in real time and maintain it on a monthly basis. They are extremely appealing to marketing managers in that they can usually get you up and running in 4-6 weeks and require little or no involvement with your IT team. However, they have limitations in terms of tracking, SEO and the types of user experiences they can support.

The alternate route is to integrate mobile content into your existing web environment. For brands already utilizing a content management system, this route is often very possible and the most practical long term from the standpoint of cost and maintenance. A web environment that hosts both mobile and desktop content enables you to update content simultaneously across all platforms. The consolidated maintenance is far more time and cost-effective and enables you to fluidly address new platforms as they emerge by simply adding new templates to your CMS. This approach also enables you to create the richer, more app-like interfaces that are so appealing to users now. The Toyota Touch (http://touch.toyota.com) site built by iCrossing is a great example of this app-like mobile web approach.

Which route a client takes depends on factors such as budget, marketing goals, and upcoming plans for web site redesigns. The important thing is to create the best possible experience and most relevant content for your mobile users.

GMA: Do you need to have mobile content before you can consider experimenting with mobile search marketing?
RP: Not necessarily. We do strongly recommend to our clients that they create the best possible mobile experience, and most of them have either done so already or are in the process. A lack of mobile content right now doesn’t mean you can’t see success with mobile advertising - but good mobile content will yield the very best results.

GMA: If you’re in the process of developing a mobile site but only have desktop content available at present, what are your best options for increasing your presence on mobile?
RP: The single most important thing to do is to create specific, mobile-only campaigns. We’ve seen a remarkable before and after difference in click-through rates to these devices when we do so for brands that don’t yet have mobile content. You should also be prepared to set aggressive initial bids for these campaigns to ensure that your ads reach the top 1-2 positions. Reaching those top two spots is crucial for optimal ROI on your campaigns. Another highly effective thing you can do if you have a local business or any type of brick-and-mortar presence is to claim your Google Places listing. So much of mobile traffic is local, and claiming your Google Places listing is a quick and easy win.

Keep in mind that if your desktop site performs very well on a mobile device, you can probably test drive many of the  more sophisticated mobile advertising options. If it doesn’t, you’re probably wise to start small. Observe the behavior of your mobile visitors and apply what you learn to your mobile content development efforts.

GMA: What advice do you have for brands that do have mobile content and are ready to really invest in the mobile search opportunity?
RP:  Bidding to reach and maintain that optimal first or second position on a mobile search results page is the most important recommendation. Mobile is competitive so prepare to bid 2x higher to mange to the 1st and 2nd positions and then maintain from there. Another top level recommendation that applies to brands across every vertical is to use broad match and brand keywords to maximize impressions.

Be sure to utilize analytics and conversion tracking since this enables you to test how effective your ads are and if they result in specific site activities. Make note of what mobile users do, where they come from and how their behavior differs from desktop users, then apply what you’ve learned to subsequent campaigns.

Understanding these mobile behavior patterns is crucial because your customers may have very different objectives in mind when searching via mobile so you can’t assume they will respond to the same calls to action as they will on the desktop. For instance, if you are a retail brand with brick and mortar storefronts, it is fair to assume that a smartphone user who just googled your closest location is much more likely to respond to a limited time offer than a desktop user who may be much further back in the purchase funnel. Tailor your ads to what you know about the mobile context and about your own users in particular.

GMA: What about the ads themselves - what makes for a strong and effective mobile ad?
RP: First and foremost, a mobile specific call to action. For example, we see terrific success for many of our clients with click-to-call on mobile ads. It’s important to understand all the action your users are most likely to perform when searching for your business on a mobile device whether it being clicking to call, clicking to an offer, clicking to Google maps, etc. Once you understand those customer goals, you can build ads that will resonate with those users. It helps to pay attention to the actions mobile visitors take to your site in general. Use your site analytics!

GMA: Have you seen certain ad types to be more effective on mobile than others?
RP:  Certainly - click to call on mobile is especially powerful for mobile, for all the obvious reasons. Of course, click to call is not applicable for every brand, but brands using the AdWords call extension have seen CTR increase by as much as 30%.

We’ve also seen great success with location extensions and hyperlocal. 1 in 3 searches have local intent so for any brand with brick and mortar locations these are very smart ad choices since they enable you to target users in the immediate vicinity of your location with ads that can draw them into the store - e.g. sales, limited time offers. We’ve seen a positive response from mobile site links as well. The ability to offer mobile users variety of choices from within a single ad is highly beneficial since it increases the liklihood of the users finding what he or she wants very quickly.


GMA: Are there any trends you’re seeing that brands should be wise to?
MM: Well, if you have mobile apps, you’d be smart to test Ads for Apps. While the App Store and Android Market represent the most immediate channel for app discovery and download, search engines play a increasingly strong yet unrecognized role in app discovery. For some of our clients, we’re seeing a very strong click to download rate for their mobile applications from this new ad model. Moreover, experimenting with SEM for apps enables brands to gain that crucial understanding of how users search for mobile content.

GMA: Any closing advice?
MM: Experiment, analyze and invest! Mobile search traffic is only going to increase. Now is the time to gain an understanding of your mobile customers and how to connect with them successfully!

We’d like to thank Rachel and iCrossing for taking the time to talk to us about their experience with Mobile Ads so far. To learn more, including how to get started and best practices, please visit the Google Mobile Ads site.

Posted by Sonja Lee, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Mobile advertising has created an entirely new opportunity for businesses to drive phone calls to sales teams and call centers, generating a new method for our advertisers to receive qualified incoming leads. In fact, since we introduced the click-to-call feature to advertisers over a year ago, we’ve had more than half a million customers  globally run campaigns with phone extensions.

Two of the most common ways to get mobile customers to call you are either by listing your phone number on a click-to-call ad, or adding your phone number onto your website. It’s easy to measure calls from a click-to-call ad from your Campaign reports, but it can be more challenging  to track the calls made by consumers clicking on the phone number on your website.  

Today, we are introducing a new conversion tracking metric to help advertisers and agencies do just that: all AdWords accounts will now have the ability to report calls placed from mobile pages.

A Direct Star TV landing page featuring prominent ‘call’ buttons from beta partner Red Ventures

You’ll now be able to attribute clicks on your phone number or ‘call’ button back to the AdWords campaign, ad group, ad or keyword that brought a customer in. As this is a new tracking metric, there won’t be new charges or changes to CPCs. We hope that this new metric will give advertisers and agencies new, richer information on the value and returns from their mobile advertising.  

Red Ventures, a customer acquisition company in Charlotte, NC, was a beta partner for this new conversion metric. In addition to their own proprietary in-house tracking platform, they used this new metric to track the use of click-to-call numbers on their mobile websites for a variety of partners.  John Sutton, VP of Online Marketing at Red Ventures, said, “Now, every advertiser can get full insight into calls generated from their AdWords spend on mobile devices, directly inside the AdWords interface and at a very granular level.” Moreover, John sees this as a new added benefit to AdWords advertisers who “don’t have the capability required to produce unique keyword or ad level phone numbers on their mobile websites.”

This new metric enables all advertisers to leverage existing AdWords tools to now optimize for calls.  According to John Sutton at Red Ventures, this “opens the doors to participation in AdWords features that rely on conversion metrics like Enhanced CPC and Target CPA bidding.” You can start using this new metric by installing a snippet of code on your landing pages. Upon doing so, you can set ‘calls’ as a conversion metric to track on your landing page. Next, you can pair calls focused campaigns with tools like Conversion Optimizer, then bid by setting a target CPA for calls, and ultimately automate ad serving to optimize for calls.

If driving calls is an important part of your mobile advertising strategy, and you’ve placed a phone number or ‘Call now!’ button on your site, begin measuring these calls now using this new conversion type. Moreover, in doing so you’ll be able to leverage a rich set of existing AdWords tools available to you to optimize performance. For more information on how to set this up, please see our Help Center article.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Product Manager, Mobile Ads

Meliá Hotels International is one of the largest hotel companies in the world with more than 350 hotels (including brands such as Gran Meliá, Meliá, Sol and Paradisus) and is actively positioning itself to seize the opportunity in the mobile market. Daniel Garcia Langa, Online Sales & Marketing Director, believes that the mobile platform will eventually get a lot bigger than the desktop Internet is now. Therefore they launched a website optimized for mobile devices, becoming the first Spanish hotel chain to offer this service.

Meliá Hotels International mobile site

After launch of their site, they have observed that it is typically business travelers reserving hotel rooms from mobile devices. This customer segment looks for city-based hotels and makes reservations very last-minute. These hotel bookings currently account for 70 % of reservations on mobile corresponding to 60 % of revenue.

To ensure that users found their mobile site, Meliá Hotels International already from the beginning implemented AdWords campaigns specifically targeting mobile devices. In August alone, AdWords drove 27 % of their mobile traffic. They have in fact seen traffic from mobile devices increase by six in comparison to 2010 and the number of transactions have multiplied by twelve.

Meliá Hotels International predicts that in the mid-term the use of tablet devices will result in a significant rise in holiday hotel reservations. Due to the large screen-size and interactive features it becomes much easier for customers to make decisions when booking their holidays.

For more details on this case study, you can download the full version in English or Spanish.

Posted by Frank Albert Coates, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile ads

Good data on the smartphone user is hard to come by. Good data that enables companies to make data driven decisions on how to engage with consumers on their smartphone is even harder to come by.

Today we are launching a new resource to address that need. Our Mobile Planet www.ourmobileplanet.com is a new web site featuring an interactive tool that anyone can use to create custom charts that will deepen their understanding of the mobile consumer and support data driven decisions on their mobile strategy.

The site gives anyone access the full set of data from the “Global Mobile Research: The Smartphone User & The Mobile Marketer” we conducted earlier this year (March & July 2011) with Ipsos and in collaboration with the Mobile Marketing Association.

Example of a presentation ready chart on ourmobileplanet.com

Need to know the smartphone penetration in Singapore? It’s 62%. Trying to figure out if more consumers in France or Germany have made purchases via their smartphone? It’s France. Want to know if consumers in the UK visit a store after doing a local search on their smartphone? 41% of them do.

Now anyone - marketer, app developer, tech geek, big or small - can answer these questions and many more by drawing on one of the the most extensive, far reaching standardized surveys on smartphone user behavior ever conducted. Not to mention, this is the first time a study this extensive has been made available for free. 

We commissioned this survey and have made the data available for free because we believe the shift to mobile is so fundamental that we need to do everything we can to help businesses adapt immediately.

Posted by:
Nicole Leverich
Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

At IAB MiXX in New York, I got to demo some of the amazing things that are possible with HTML5 mobile rich media creative, like our recent Uncover Your World campaign.

Today, we’re making HTML5 banners available to all advertisers and agencies, providing marketers with a richer canvas on which to create beautiful ad experiences on mobile.  In addition to animations, HTML5 banners enable marketers use mobile device capabilities like tilt and shake to enrich their creatives.  These banners will run on all our ad unit sizes for both tablets and smartphones in iOS and Android mobile apps in the AdMob network, and will offer new opportunities for marketers to drive engagement and improved performance on mobile.

What’s possible with HTML5 banners? Inspired by IAB MiXX’s host city, New York, we created a sample ad to show some of the things marketers will be able to do with this new format.  In the ad, the New York skyline appears layer by layer, and then, as the user tilts the tablet, the skyline moves, creating the illusion that the user is peering around the buildings. Click here from your tablet to see the ad.



Mobile display advertising is skyrocketing and we’re dedicated to fostering this ecosystem and helping it continue to grow.  In addition to new creative tools like HTML5 banners, we’re also working hard to make mobile display ads more efficient.  Today, beta advertisers can serve rich media ads from Doubleclick into AdMob apps, a feature that has seen exciting initial results. We are also working closely with the IAB to create the industry's first standards for mobile rich media ads, which will make easier to run rich media ads across multiple ad networks.

We look forward to seeing what all those creative minds come up with!

Posted by: Clay Bavor, Product Management Director, Mobile Ads