Last Thursday, we presented a webinar “Making Mobile-Friendly Websites: Best Practices in Action” on the resources you need to learn about what makes a good mobile site and to start building one. This was part of our broader “GoMo” initiative, which helps businesses “Go Mobile”.
Dai Pham and Sonja Lee of the Google Mobile Ads team presented an overview of the mobile momentum, why mobile sites matter, 10 best practices with full case studies and business examples. They also introduced the tools and resources showcased in HowToGoMo.com to the audience.
According to the Harvard Business Review, Asia-Pacific is expected by many to constitute half of the world’s economic growth by 2030 1. According to internal Google research, nearly half of the top ten markets for smartphone penetration are in Asia. AdMob requests grew by 500% in Asia Pacific last year, the highest in the world. A rapidly expanding population, upward trending consumer spending and living standards, and significant infrastructure investment all help to make Asia-Pacific a hot market. As such, starting today Google Mobile Ads will focus this next week on Asia-Pacific to help you optimize your Asia strategy for mobile. About Lexus Lexus has established a unique place in the automotive world as a manufacturer of premium vehicles. The Lexus brand is synonymous with breathtaking design, innovative technology, heart-stopping performance and environmental sensitivity. In March 2010, Lexus launched the first luxury hybrid hatch on the Australian market, the CT 200h, reinforcing Lexus’ commitment to innovation. The target audience was people in their late 20s to early 40s, both singles & couples, with a high disposable income and for whom style, design and technology is important. Lexus’ objective for the CT 200h, launch was threefold:
To drive awareness among the target audience;
To focus messaging on the unique features of the CT 200h, such as the Two Mood-Two mode;
To connect and engage with their audience to drive consideration.
Solution Among the target audience, smartphone ownership and internet penetration is very high. Subsequently, casual gaming usage is heavy, a typical quote being “When I need something to pass the time, I use Lineup on my iPhone.” Based on these insights, Lexus, The White Agency (Lexus’ digital agency) and Admob worked together to create The Lexus CT City Challenge -a mobile app that was addictive in nature, held the key product benefits ‘eco’ and ‘sports’ two moode-tow mode at its centre. They also ensured the game is part of the overall CT 200h and F1 strategy, and it was also incentivised with a grand prize of a CT 200h. The digital directive was lead by The White Agency and development of the app by Webling. The app was created with a young, urban, design and quality-conscious audience in mind, this being the primary target group for the car itself. They are frequent visitors to the Apple iTunes App Store, engaging with and purchasing casual gaming offerings in high quantities. To build awareness and acquisition of the app, Admob also created a mobile ads campaign.. The Lexus CT City Challenge Game The game challenges players to take the Lexus CT 200h for a virtual spin around courses modeled after Australia's capital cities. The game features five courses which are progressively unlocked as players achieve qualifying scores. Engagement was incentivised with a live playoff at the Melbourne Motor Show with the winner receiving a brand new Lexus CT 200h The “Slot Cars” style gameplay demonstrates the unique hybrid “two mood – two mode” feature of the CT 200h. This allows players to switch between ‘Sport’ and ‘Eco’ modes to achieve the best times while saving fuel, culminating in higher scores and positioning on the leader board. Players can easily broadcast their scores across social media, challenging friends to download the game, or beat their scores/position on the leader board. The game was developed via a custom 3D engine and features realistic torque physics, particle animation, sound effects and an original music soundtrack, with a stylised look and feel to match the Lexus brand. The Admob Mobile Ads campaign The campaign ran from 21st April to 1st June across the Admob network, targeting iPhones, iPads and iPods. Click-to-download banners were displayed on mobile apps such as Words With Friends, Angry Birds, WeatherZone, and various mobile websites. These sent the user through to the iTunes App Store where they could download the app. A burst strategy was employed to upweight investment at strategic intervals to help the app rise up the iTunes ranks in order to achieve higher vis ibility and gain more organic downloads. Results ● Won “Best mobile advertising campaign” at the 2011 Mobile Marketing Awards. ● Total time played (all players): 1,138:46:83 (hh:mm:ss) ● Average number of plays per user: 5.01 ● Most number of plays by a single user: 131 ● CTR:1.03% ● Downloads peaked 2 weeks after the campaign launch. A 2nd peak occurred during the last week of the campaign ● Highest Ranks in iTunes Store achieved during the campaign ○ Racing: 5th ○ Game: 76th ○ Overall 168th Quote from Julie Hutchinson, CRM & Interactive Marketing Manager, Lexus Australia "For the launch of the Lexus CT200h we wanted to reach out to a new demographic, a younger audience in their late 20s to 40s. The Lexus CT City Challenge mobile campaign was the perfect way to achieve this objective. It created a sense of excitement and innovation around the Lexus brand and kept this demographic engaged with the car and the brand."
In September, we announced that mobile site optimization would soon become a new factor in ads quality for all campaigns running mobile search traffic. This past week, we introduced GoMo, an initiative to help businesses “Go Mobile” by giving them tools and resources to build a website that works well on smartphones. Today, we want to let you know that this new factor in mobile ads quality will be rolling out to all advertisers. Ads that have mobile optimized landing pages will tend to perform better in AdWords -- they will generally drive more mobile traffic at a lower cost.
The AdWords system will automatically visit your landing page, and evaluate your site as viewed by smartphones. However, if you already have a mobile site, we recommend confirming with your webmaster that you’ve configured your server to show the mobile-optimized site when the AdWords mobile User-Agent is detected.
We encourage you see what your mobile customers see. Visit your website on a smartphone or in the “GoMoMeter” preview tool on HowToGoMo.com. The GoMoMeter will analyze your site and give you customized recommendations on how to make your site more mobile friendly to customers. If you don’t have a mobile site, but are interested in getting started, please check out best practices and the directory of vendors HowToGoMo.com.
Posted by David Nachum, Product Manager, Mobile Ads
Recently we launched GoMo, an initiative to help businesses learn how to build sites that work well on mobile phones. As we were working on this project, we thought it was a great opportunity to apply the knowledge we had gained to our own site. Today, we’re delighted to announce the mobile-friendly version of Google Mobile Ads, which you can take for a spin at google.com/mobileads on your mobile device.
In addition to practicing what we’re preaching, there were important reasons to build a mobile site. Use of the mobile web is accelerating and there are now 96 million smartphones in use in the US.[1] That number becomes much more tangible through the lens of your own analytics data. When we looked at our site, we observed a rapid increase in mobile visits over the past year. Today, nearly 10% of overall traffic to our Mobile Ads website comes from mobile devices. That’s hard to ignore.
We realized that our mobile users were having a really poor experience when accessing the desktop site via a mobile phone. Furthermore, we were wasting 10% of our efforts in marketing the site. Again, the data didn’t lie: the site’s bounce rate from mobile devices was above 60%, more than double the bounce rate from desktop users. Clearly something was up.
How did we do it? I sat down with a webmaster here at Google - Jerome Senaillat - and together we shaped the content and features that would work best on mobile. The process was surprisingly quick: we had a near-final working version of the site in just four weeks, without working on the project full time. We followed this list of ten best practices when designing the site, focusing on three which would greatly improve the experience for a mobile user:
Design for visibility: the problem with the homepage was that none of the content could be read without causing eyestrain. The solution was drastic: we abandoned the images on the homepage and replaced it with an easy-to-read, simple-to-navigate menu.
Keep it quick: using our analytics data we were able to identify the most popular content consumed by mobile users on our desktop site - such as our mobile insights page - and made it quick to access from the homepage of the mobile site.
Make it easy to convert: a primary goal of our site is drive people to try mobile ads by creating an AdWords account. We optimized that experience for mobile users by connecting them to a call center where an advisor can create the account on the fly. We set up a separate phone number to track calls.
We’re excited about the early results we’ve seen since launch. Already, we’ve noticed that mobile users are staying on the site twice as long as they did before.
Jerome and I recorded a short video to explain what we did in a bit more detail, you can check it out below. It was easy to GoMo and we hope you’ll GoMo too!
Posted by Mike Schipper, Google Mobile Ads Marketing
In this video, Avinash Kaushik (http://www.kaushik.net/avinash) shares some best practices mobile marketing strategies, and points out some strategies that you should beware of. He also shares a framework for bringing fast, innovative measurement to your mobile data (including a special downloadable report).
Posted by Kevin Otsuka, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads
TicketsNow is an online marketplace where fans of live events can buy and sell tickets. With the knowledge that 25% of Google queries for tickets comes from mobile devices, it became clear that TicketsNow needed a solution for their customers to quickly and easily purchase tickets while on the go.
TicketsNow were excited to invest in a mobile-optimized site that was transaction ready so they could be there for fans at the very moment they wanted tickets. A small team of in-house developers quickly had a version up and running. They aligned their search strategy at the same time, and created separate mobile campaigns in AdWords to direct people to the site.
The response from customers was enthusiastic: the conversion rate for ticket sales increased by 50% and mobile sales doubled. ‘We wanted to cover the cost of building the mobile site using the margin generated by incremental sales from Google mobile paid search. We are right on track to achieve that,’ said Sachin Gadhvi, TicketsNow’s director of search and mobile marketing.
Watch the video case study to learn all the details of how Ticketsnow achieved their goals. You can also download a PDF summary of the case study here.
Your business can ‘GoMo’ too! Learn more at www.howtogomo.com.
Posted by: Mike Schipper, Google Mobile Ads Marketing
Do you know what your customers are experiencing when they see your website on their mobile phones? With today’s customers constantly on mobile devices, it’s important that your website is mobile-ready. We believe that the most important thing that your business or client can do to grow their business using mobile is to create a mobile-friendly website.
As you’ve probably seen from this blog, we launched an initiative called GoMo that helps businesses “Go Mobile”, and would like to invite you to an upcoming webinar where we'll show you the resources you need to learn about what makes a good mobile site and to start building one.
Join us to learn more about:
Why mobile sites matter
Using the GoMoMeter to test your site’s mobile-readiness
10 elements of good mobile site design
Illustrated examples and case studies of companies Going Mobile
Resources to help you get started building a mobile-friendly website
Details are as follows: When: Thursday, November 10th 2011 11:00am PST, 2:00pm EST Where: This webinar will be held on WebEx. Click here to register, or visit http://goo.gl/uL6Dv
Are you ready to learn more about how to 'GoMo'? Sign up for our webinar today.
