S E P T E M B E R 2016 The Mobile Brief
THE MOBILE MARKETING BRIEF
OP TIM ISI NG MO BIL E MO ME NTS : AN END -TO -EN D FOC US
www.greenlightdigital.com
Paid Search
I’ve been working in paid search for six years now, and the start of each year has been marked by Google announcing that it’ll be ‘the year of mobile’. In the early years this was hard to believe as traffic was lower and conversions were non-existent. But 2013 marked a transition period as searches started shifting from desktop to mobile by at least 30%. A new era began in 2015 when mobile searches outgrew desktop searches for the first time, and now that we’re also seeing conversions follow, it’s time for marketers to pay serious attention to mobile as a channel. Don’t believe it? Here’s some food for thought1 The average user checks their phone 200 times per day
to be present during the research phase. The risk is that if they’re not, potential customers won’t be there for them in the decision phase.
The average user switches between devices 28 times per day 54% of decisions start on mobile and finish elsewhere
THE MOBILE BASICS WE SHOULD ALL BE GETTING RIGHT
Aggregating the traffic of our client base, this year
Google has broadly defined micro-moments as ‘I want to’
we’ve seen the following traffic all come from mobile:
moments, e.g. ‘I want to go’, ‘I want to know’, ‘I want to do’
42% of our brand traffic, 64% of generic traffic and a
and ‘I want to buy’ searches2.
whopping 67% of shopping traffic
Micro-moments epitomise to what degree advertisers
What’s clear from this is that the traffic volume is on
must meet needs at the right moment in time – be it
mobile, particularly during the research phase of the
by providing a location extension in search to finding a
customer journey. We live on our mobile devices these
store front, or through a how-to video for an appliance.
days, and alongside checking our social media accounts
In a nutshell, advertisers need to be visible, offer useful
or streaming TV shows and videos, we’re researching our
information and offer it quickly. Today’s users have lost
next holiday, investigating credit cards, or trying to find
their patience and aren’t willing to wait for pages to load or
exactly the right outfit for that wedding. All on the go, all
images to render, so speed is an essential area to get right.
on our mobiles. This highlights the importance for brands
2
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Paid Search
Further to that, measurement is an essential part of capturing the information you need to optimise your strategy, allowing you to attribute actions to the right trigger. While mobile doesn’t perform in exactly the same way as desktop, it’s still a very important channel that adds plenty of value to the user journey. That being said, we need to measure where the decision started as well as how it started. A more holistic approach should be taken to traditional methods of attribution. I recall a client that was running a lot of Twitter activity. We found that sales correlated with retweets, a valuable learning that helped inform our strategy on social. A specific example this may be, but the ability to track what was seemingly a ‘meaningless’ engagement metric and how it impacted on revenue was a huge step. This is exactly why mobile engagement needs to be measured, its path tracked effectively and the value of the sale attributed throughout the journey. We also need to think about things from a cross-channel perspective, given that users tend to research on mobile and convert through another channel. When tracking through Google Analytics, there are three f
