As head of online marketing for Carphone Warehouse, Gareth Jones instinctively believes in the “ripple effect” of mobile. “We have this hypothesis that a lot of what you do on mobile may not immediately affect the mobile sale, but that mobile is the glue that ties together multi-channel activity,” he says. “So a pound invested in mobile shouldn’t be assessed only from a mobile ROI.”

An unbeatable opportunity to test this theory landed in Gareth’s lap when Best Buy UK, a joint venture between Best Buy Inc and Carphone Warehouse Group, launched a fully transactional mobile website. Although Best Buy as a brand was subsequently pulled back from the UK, the insights Carphone Warehouse gained about mobile’s contribution to multi-channel brand building has already been built into its strategy.

Starting from a baseline of low brand awareness of Best Buy in the UK, Gareth and his team implemented an integrated Google advertising approach to supplement existing search activity. A series of roadblocks ran on YouTube for mobile to raise awareness, while pre-rolls on YouTube showed the brand’s TV ads. They also ran display ads across the AdMob network. Through these means, they hoped to gain mass reach and high frequency at relatively low cost while interacting with users through an on-the-go rich media experience.

The campaign saw a 45% increase in desktop CTR, a 30% increase in tablet CTR and a 29% lift in mobile CTR. Over the weekend of the YouTube takeovers, Best Buy brand terms saw an organic lift of about 25%. Meanwhile, mobile traffic grew week-on-week by 37% off the back of the YouTube takeover.

But these numbers are only part of the story; Carphone Warehouse also derived rich analytical insights about user behaviour. YouTube results provided much deeper information than what’s available when users consume a TV ad on TV, and the CPM for running it on YouTube was around 20% cheaper than TV boxes too. The YouTube roadblocks ran on specific days, and this enabled Gareth to study the mobile’s multi-channel influence. “We pretty much saw an immediate ripple effect,” he reveals. “Post-roadblock we saw a 29% increase in the subsequent week in brand searches on desktop.”

Earlier this year when Gareth’s team launched m.carphonewarehouse.com – the first fully transactional site in the telco category – they applied the insights from Best Buy and rolled them straight into the mobile plan for Carphone Warehouse. Going forward, the aim is to replicate the successful Best Buy Mobile model outside of North America and Western Europe too, and when that happens they’ll be ready.

Read the full case study on Best Buy UK’s mobile activity here.

Posted by: Matt Brocklehurst, Product Marketing Mobile Advertising

We’re delighted to feature a guest post from Amit Shah, Director of Online, Mobile and Social Media, 1-800Flowers.com.  Amit tackles Questions 1 & 2 from The Mobile Playbook.  

For more than 30 years since Jim and Chris McCann started 1-800-Flowers.com, our mission has been rather simple: to deliver smiles. Whether it is a customer sending one of our truly original floral arrangements to celebrate a family member's birthday or a corporate executive sending one of our delicious gourmet food gift baskets to thank a business client, we deliver smiles across thousands of communities every day. Central to being successful in this mission is to make the experience of sending smiles easy. So we have always been at the forefront of whatever technology our consumers adapt and make it easy for them to interact with us whether it is using a telephone to dial our toll-free number, or using a laptop to reach us online or increasingly firing up their mobile phones and tablets to reach us on the mobile web or through an app.

This third wave of change for our business from mobile has been a real disrupter in how quickly we have seen our users embrace it, especially as the penetration of smartphones has rapidly increased in the last few years. This has really sharpened our focus on providing them an outstanding user experience on mobile. So even though we started with a mobile site, we followed it up with rich apps designed for the top three platforms used by a majority of our users. Along the way we realized that the mobile ecosystem allows for adoption across a spectrum of user types and use cases and our ability to meet these expectations while keeping the experience easy is a critical component of our value proposition. For example, power users can leverage our apps for rich functionality like push notifications and set them up to get reminders for an event like Valentine’s Day making it easy to send smiles to that someone special, whereas the more casual users can use their mobile browser and quickly reach our mobile site to also send that smile easily. Or for example, in the case of last minute shoppers, they can leverage our real time delivery calendar functionality on both the mobile web and apps to get same day delivery on the gift of their choice.

The focus on making it easy for our users also means that we are rarely static with our optimization efforts. In spite of having created an award winning mobile experience, we noticed from analytics data and consumer ethnographic studies that our users could be served better so last year we partnered with Moovweb to revamp our entire mobile experience including mobile site and all of our apps. By looking at best practices from around the web and taking a deep dive into the customer experience and functionalities of our old mobile website, we identified the right elements to guide our redesign efforts. The important lesson here is not to just bring all of the desktop functionalities into the mobile experience, but to bring the right elements to mobile that are both useful and engaging for the users.

                        Before                                                                    After

We were especially rigorous in tightening the checkout flow where we eliminated more than half of the steps to checkout from the old experience. Even after we rolled out the new site and apps, we have continued our optimization efforts leveraging analytics data like purchase funnel metrics and qualitative inputs. For example, post-launch, we noticed that our ‘Find a Gift Fast’ functionality was heavily used by our mobile site users and it was buried a click deep on category pages and not on the home page. Through design iterations and testing we were able to move it upstream in the mobile web experience and add it to the homepage itself, thus eliminating even that single click barrier to access. The results from this build, test and iterate model have been exceptional both from business and customer satisfaction metrics alike. As we ramp up our preparations in the next couple of weeks for Mother’s Day, we will continue to make it easier for our customers to leverage our mobile experience. It takes us closer to our mission of delivering smiles– one smartphone at a time. Posted by: Amit Shah, Director of Online, Mobile and Social Media, 1-800Flowers.com

Thanks for your guest post, Amit!
Visit www.themobileplaybook.com to learn more. View it from your tablet if you can!

Last week Google launched The Mobile Playbook, a resource guide for executives on how to implement mobile into their organizations and win with mobile.  Today, we’d like to shed some light on the actual work that went behind themobileplaybook.com and what that means for advertisers from a technology and mobile strategy standpoint.

We built The Mobile Playbook in partnership with Hello Monday, a creative agency with strong capabilities in HTML5 design. We saw this site not only as an opportunity to showcase useful content but also as an opportunity to demonstrate the power of HTML5.  To put it another way, we wanted to walk the talk.  It is one thing to recommend that advertisers optimize across screens and another to actually do it ourselves.

To that end, we required that the content be staged on a mobile website instead of an app because of the cross-platform reach we could get from this approach; themobileplaybook.com can be viewed not only from tablets and smartphones but also from PCs. In optimizing for PC, smartphone and tablet,  we created two versions of the site -- one for smartphones and one for tablets. The PC optimized site is actually the tablet version with some minor modifications to the UI.



The Mobile Playbook posed unique design challenges as well. The core playbook content itself is long-form, representing 5 chapters and over 6,000 words. Our goal was to engage users and get them to read as much of the playbook as they could. Most of the creative energy went into thinking about how to make the playbook easy to read, visually stimulating, and fun to interact with -- an opportunity seemingly made for tablets. Based on our own data and other research findings, we know that users engage with tablets primarily as lean-back content consumption devices.

Instead of some of the original format ideas we considered such as an ebook or PDF presentation of the content on the tablet, we worked with Hello Monday to explore the interactive potential of HTML5 and think about how the long form content could be best presented through a tablet browser window. According to Andreas Anderskou from Hello Monday, “Inspired by interactive magazine apps, The Mobile Playbook utilizes a dynamic progress bar, interactive navigation menu, example gallery, and the ability to swipe through content. What's unique about this experience is that we've brought app-like interactivity to the user without requiring them to download an app. To emulate app functionality the content is loaded upfront without the need to ever load a new page.”

“In our time working on the site, we’ve seen that HTML5 has the potential to take browsing experiences on the tablet to the next level. Since modern browsers are rapidly deploying with HTML5 capabilities, the end user no longer needs to download specific apps or plugins to enjoy a consistent experience. We hope that this will inspire others to design around the capabilities of the tablet and HTML5 mobile websites to enhance the browsing experience,” says Anders Jessen, Lead Developer at Hello Monday.

We were fortunate to partner with Hello Monday to illustrate the power of HTML5 websites and tablets. We hope you’ll enjoy www.themobileplaybook.com from your tablet or whichever device suits you.

Posted by: Johanna Werther, Sr. PMM Mobile Ads

In case you missed it, last Wednesday we launched The Mobile Playbook and held a mobile strategy panel via a Hangout on Air on the Think with Google Google+ page.  The panel of leading mobile experts across multiple industries shared their perspectives on the 5 questions explored in The Mobile Playbook that every business should ask to win with mobile.  On our panel we heard from:

• Joao Machado - Director of Mobile, OMD
• Michelle Ogle - Digital Marketing and Affiliate Strategy Manager, Starwood Hotels and Resorts
• Joshua Palau - VP of Digital Sales and Marketing, Comcast
• Amit Shah - Director of Online, Mobile and Social Media, 1-800Flowers.com

Some of the key takeaways from the panel included:

• Insights into how Comcast saw tremendous mobile traffic even before they built out a mobile specific experience
• Tip’s from 1-800Flowers.com’s award-winning mobile website strategy
• Starwood hotels’ insights from their successful hyper local marketing campaigns that explored the unique demands of mobile travelers
• OMD’s perspective on the differences between tablets and smartphones
• Insights from the group about how they have structured their organizations for success in mobile

Check out the highlights from our panel below and visit www.themobileplaybook.com to explore these questions further and see how this panel and others are approaching and winning with mobile.  If you’d like to view the entire panel discussion, you can do so here.

 

Click here to watch highlights from our Hangout on Air with mobile thought leaders

Posted by: Jason Spero, Head of Global Mobile Sales and Strategy

Mobile search is a powerful channel for businesses to engage with customers that are searching for them or for their application. Last year, we introduced improvements to click-to-download ads, and for publishers, launched Custom Search Ads for Mobile Apps. Today we’d like to share several new features that will make it even easier for AdWords advertisers to promote, track and monetize their mobile app. For the first time, businesses can use AdWords mobile search ads as a holistic solution to promote, monetize and track their app downloads.

Promote your app using the new Mobile App extension
All AdWords advertisers will receive the option to use a new Ad Extension - the Mobile App extension; a new way to promote their mobile apps. Not all mobile users searching for a business may know that the business has an app. The Mobile App extension allows advertisers to append a mobile app download link to their search ads. With this extension, advertisers can promote their mobile app to users who may simply be searching for their brand, product or service.

The mobile app extension gives advertisers a new distribution channel for their mobile apps and users a new discovery medium. Beta participants saw a 6% lift in CTR for campaigns using Mobile App extensions, compared to control campaigns.

The new Mobile App Extension found in the “Ad Extensions” tab. Use its new ‘app picker’ function to easily find your company’s app in Google Play Store or iTunes App Store

GrubHub, a web and mobile service that connects diners to restaurants and simplifies online ordering for delivery and pick up, was an early beta tester of the Mobile App extension. In addition to pointing mobile customers searching for food delivery services to their mobile website, they used the mobile app extension to add an additional link to their app download page. Abby Hunt from the GrubHub team explains the importance of reaching customers on mobile: “GrubHub is dedicated to feeding our diners anytime, anywhere - this is why it is important for us to reach our diners on their mobile devices. Hungry people are checking their mobile devices on the way home from work or walking to class, and we need to be where they are.”

GrubHub was an early tester of the Mobile App extension, allowing hungry customers searching for their business the option of accessing information on their mobile site or app via an ad.

Enriching click-to-download ads with more useful app information
Advertisers running campaigns solely focused on promoting and driving downloads of their app will benefit from recent changes that add more useful information to their click-to-download ads. Last year, we added mobile app icons next to the text ad. We’ve now incorporated richer information about your mobile app right in the ad unit itself. When a user searches and your click-to-download ad appears, they’ll be able to see image previews, a description of your app, and when applicable, pricing and rating information.

All this new information in the click-to-download ad is automatically drawn from the Google Play Store and iTunes App Store. We hope that customers will benefit from recent changes that make click-to-download ads more engaging and for users searching on Google.

Quicken Loans Inc., the nation’s largest online home lender and a top five retail lender uses click-to-download ads to promote their Mortgage Calculator App. They’ve seen a rapid increase in the number of customer searching for them on mobile. Greg Broda, Paid Search Partner Manager at Quicken Loans explains: "When it came time to promote the new Quicken Loans Mortgage Calculator app, the decision to utilize Google’s mobile click-to-download ad platform was a no-brainer. The placement has allowed us to share the app with a very targeted and engaged group of users."

Quicken Loans runs click-to-download ads, now complete with app previews and pricing information,  that point users to their app download page.

Track Android app downloads through AdWords
Businesses will now be able to track downloads of their Android app from their AdWords campaigns as an AdWords conversion. This means that when a user downloads a mobile app from the Google Play store via a click-to-download ad or a mobile app extension, we will count their download as a conversion.  For more information on how to set this up, visit this page. 

Monetizing your mobile app with Custom Search Ads for Mobile Apps
We’ve now brought Custom Search Ads to tablet apps via the recent launch of a new AdMob SDK. Tablet and mobile app users will receive ads relevant to what they're searching for inside an app, and businesses running mobile apps will have a new tool to monetize their content and services.

Mobile apps represent a significant opportunity for businesses to reach their customers, and mobile search is an important channel to reach these customers. We’re looking forward to bringing new products in the coming year that will help businesses grow by promoting, tracking, and monetizing their mobile apps with Google.  

Posted by Anurag Agrawal, Product Manager, Mobile Search Ads

Yesterday we launched www.themobileplaybook.com, our new resource we hope will help business leaders understand how to strategically approach the mobile space in 2012 and beyond.  

Today we thought we’d cut to the chase and summarize the action items we recommend in hopes this will jumpstart conversations you may be having internally about what to do in the mobile space. While we highly encourage you to pick up your tablet (or smartphone or laptop) and review the The Mobile Playbook in full, we wanted to boil down the content to the following straightforward recommendations:

1. Define your value proposition by determining what your consumer wants to do with your business in mobile. Benchmark against others in your industry for ideas.
2. Build a mobile website. Once you have a mobile website, check the stats and optimize based on consumer usage.
3. Build an app for a subset of your audience after your mobile site strategy is in place. Don’t forget to promote your app.
4. Assign a Mobile Champion in your company and empower them with a cross-functional task force.
5. Set up a meeting with your agencies about what’s working and what’s not for your brand on mobile and tablets.
6. Search for your brand in mobile, as a consumer would. Take 5 minutes and do this today. What’s working?  What’s not?
7. Separate mobile-specific search campaigns from desktop search campaigns so you can test, measure and develop messaging specific for mobile.
8. Run rich media HTML5 ads to extend your branding message to reach the mobile audience.
9. Assign everyone in your marketing org the action item of reviewing their programs through a mobile lens.
10. Check out your tablet consumer’s experience with your brand. Take 5 minutes today and search for your brand on a tablet as a consumer would. What’s working? What’s not?  Maximize the tablet environment with rich media creative.

Consumers have already embraced mobile but many brands are still playing catch-up.  We encourage businesses to have a conversation internally about the current status of each of these items and create an action plan.  Start by asking the the 5 key questions posed in The Mobile Playbook at www.themobileplaybook.com.  We hope you’ll visit it from your tablet today.

Posted by: Johanna Werther, Sr. PMM Mobile Ads

Consumers are in love with their smartphones. They used them for entertainment during the Super Bowl. They used them to find a restaurant on Valentine’s Day. But for their taxes?

Millions of consumers used their mobile phone to conduct tax related searches this year. In fact, tax related searches on mobile devices jumped by 206% year over year, outpacing growth in computer queries by nearly 20x.   While this certainly reveals substantial mobile opportunity for businesses in the finance industry, it is indicative of the monumental shift in consumer behavior that mobile is driving.

                         US Search Volume for Tax Related Keywords 2010-2012

As seen in this graph, tax related searches coming from mobile devices extended across a three month period every year, showing that consumers used their mobile device at all stages of their tax preparation and filing process.  At the end of January we see a huge spike in searches as consumers received their W-2 forms and used their mobile phones to find local or online tax filing services, download tax documents or even file their tax return early. Towards the end of the tax period another large spike in search volume signals a flurry of activity as people struggle to get their taxes filed by the April 17th deadline.

This year many consumers went a step further and completed their entire tax filing process on their mobile device. As one of the most complex and dreaded of human tasks, tax filing is certainly not an activity that intuitively lends itself to mobile devices. However, TurboTax identified this shift in mobile consumer behavior and created the easy to use SnapTax app, which allowed people to file their taxes on their phone by snapping a picture of their W-2 form. TurboTax then drove awareness and downloads for SnapTax by advertising the easy-to-use app across smartphone devices.

Tax filing is only one example of the huge shift in tasks and behaviors to smartphones. Activities such as finding a new dentist, planning a trip, or buying a new car are increasingly occurring on smartphones and are taking place on those websites and apps that make it easy for them. Businesses that understand consumers have gone mobile and adapt their core strategies around this change are the ones that will win.  Three key actions all businesses must take to succeed on mobile are:

1. Make sure your websites are user friendly. Mobile optimized sites and apps are incorrectly perceived by businesses as being overly complex or expensive. The truth is that there are now so many developers out there that a mobile optimized presence is in reach for any sized business.  For more information on mobile websites and even a free mobile website builder, check out www.HowToGoMo.com.  

2. Develop a company level mobile strategy. It is no longer enough to think about how individual business initiatives can have mobile components. Instead, businesses need to have a concrete company-level strategy about how to win on mobile. This is the the focus of our recently published Mobile Playbook which discusses the 5 questions that business executives should be asking themselves about mobile.   

3. Make sure your business can be found on mobile. This means establishing a clear advertising plan, social media strategy, and ensuring relevant and updated content. Learn more about mobile advertising on www.google.com/ads/mobile/ and stay connected with the blog for updates.

This tax season teaches us that mobile is no longer an industry specific outlet or a way to distinguish yourself from competitors. If a business can find a way to easily guide a user through the entire tax filing process on a mobile device, other industries will quickly follow with customized solutions for smartphones. Mobile is quickly becoming a mandatory channel for any business that hopes to stay relevant to their consumer base.

Posted by: Adam Grunewald, Google Mobile Ads Product Marketing