Building a mobile site does not guarantee visitors will flood your site. Like any website, a mobile site requires a strong marketing strategy to draw users in. And it seems that one of the most popular online marketing tools in Australia – paid search – provides a lucrative opportunity for mobile marketers.

Globally it seems that whilst paid search represents a tiny portion of the total search market it is one that is showing rapid growth. This lack of share is partly attributed to the current low levels of market saturation meaning that those who enter early may benefit from lower than normal CPCs.

Is It Worthwhile To Invest in Paid Search in Australia?
With paid search commanding such a small piece of the paid search pie does it justify the effort to invest time and resources into maintaining a mobile paid search campaign? Statistics on mobile search in Australia are difficult to come by. Thus to illustrate the type of volume searches particular categories are attracting I have used the Google mobile keyword tool. The keywords utilised are taken from 4 key segments – jobs, real estate, holidays and entertainment.

What is interesting to see but not surprising is that those within the entertainment category such as movies and dining have a much larger ratio of searches on mobile to desktop. This is because users on the move are actively seeking information to make quick decisions about “where to next”. However other categories such as real estate still show promise not in terms of ratio’s but in overall volumes that users are searching via their mobile phone.

Setting Up A Campaign – What You Need To Know
Setting up a paid search mobile campaign is much like setting up a campaign for paid search on a desktop with a few key differences;
1) Ad Length; WAP text ads are much shorter in nature – with only 2 lines of text with a maximum of 18 characters for each. Display URLs can only be a maximum of 20 characters
2) Call To Action; Mobile ads can display a click to call button at the end of the ad instead of a display URL. In these instances the advertiser pays when a user clicks to call.
3) Carrier Targeting Options; In Australia like the US advertisers can choose to target ads to users on specific carrier networks ie Optus Mobile, Telstra etc.

What’s Coming
As always simple search advertising is just the beginning for Google. If we look further afield to the US, there are several interesting developments that will hopefully hit our shores;

1) Application Targeting; With the phenomenal growth of applications for mobiles it is no wonder that Google has begun to offer app targeting in the US. Similar to the growth of video, Google has pounced on this opportunity to provide widespread distribution of ads within applications.

2) Handset Targeting; In the US, Google has also started to offer mobile device targeting options. Thus if you only want your advertising to be shown on an iPhone you can do so. This enables marketers to have the flexibility to drive users to their mobile sites on devices that are compatible. Read more on this here

Perhaps however the most interesting developments are yet to come. In a recent interview Eric Schmidt alluded to the fact that Google has much more up their sleeve in this arena when he stated “serious growth in mobile advertising will take time. It’s probably the case that the real impact on mobile advertising will come from products that aren’t yet built,”

© Digital Marketing Lab Blog

Written By: Teresa Sperti