With the changes to Google Adwords’s Enhanced Campaigns set to become universal in June, more and more marketers are purchasing mobile ad space for their businesses. However, simply deploying a mobile ad does not guarantee conversions.
You can’t expect the ad to do all the work by itself. You need to target your customers effectively, use mobile design best practices, and make your landing pages more effective. This is especially important if you’re accepting credit cards on your mobile site.
Tip 1: Target effectively
As you already well know, your ads are most successful when they are seen by those consumers who are most likely to make a conversion. By narrowly defining your mobile audience, you can keep from wasting money advertising to people who will never make a conversion.
Be aware that your mobile customers may differ from those of your business’s overall target demographic. Therefore it’s important that you focus your mobile presence in a more strategic way in order to appeal to this segment of your audience.
- You can target your ads according to device type, location, time of day, keywords, and other factors. Use your mobile analytics to ascertain how your top performing customers view and respond to your ads, and keep adjusting your campaigns in order to narrow down your focus.
Tip 2: Design and readability
The main difference in the design and implementation of mobile ads is the enormous disparity in screen size between standard displays and those of mobile devices.
Large HD monitors can have a resolution of 1920×1200, whereas the iPhone 4 is only 640×960; some Android and Blackberry devices can have screen resolutions as low as 320×240. When designing ads for mobile, you need to design with small screens in mind.
- Cut out the clutter. Extraneous details may look great on a regular online ad, but in mobile those details turn into noise.
- Make sure that you use a font face that prioritizes readability over creative design. If users can’t tell what the ad says, they won’t click it. Consider buttons instead of text links.
- Enhance the experience – and make up for the lack of ad space – by utilizing sound or video within your mobile ads.
Tip 3: Landing pages
Getting users to click your ad is only half the conversion battle. Where do they go once they’ve clicked the ad? They should be redirected to a specialized landing page that provides more information and, ultimately, leads them to buy your product, make a call, download a file, or fill out a form.
If your mobile landing page isn’t optimized for conversions, then it doesn’t matter how intriguing your ad is – it won’t be successful.
- Your existing website, even if it’s mobile friendly, might not be the most effective destination for your mobile ad. You need a useful landing page that meets the expectation your ad sets, designed to convert mobile visitors into customers.
- Consider the power of images, especially on a smaller screen. As Volusion.com reported, “90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000x faster in the brain than text.”
Google’s revenues are expected to reach $3.6 billion in 2013, in part due to the increased use of Adwords campaigns for mobile. Use your mobile analytics to determine how to best utilize your mobile ads and landing pages for conversions – and don’t underestimate the importance of design in getting users to click your ads.
Megan Webb-Morgan is a blogger and web content writer for B2B lead generation resource, ResourceNation.com. She writes about a variety of topics including mobile marketing and business. See what they’re tweeting about @ResourceNation, and stop by ResourceNation.com/blog for more great info.
Thanks to Tim Asimos and Circle S Studio for the illustration.