We invite you to take a few minutes tomorrow and hear mobile insights, strategies and best practices from mobile search specialists. On Wednesday March 30 at 1:00 pm EST, Google’s Anjali Vaidya, Mobile Account Manager, and Bon Mercado, Senior Mobile Account Manager, will speak to 1000+ members of the American Marketing Association in a webinar; please join us.

Since marketers tend to combine their mobile and desktop campaigns in order to drive additional traffic, many marketing efforts are not yet optimized for the mobile platform. Tomorrow, Bon and Anjali will share tactics and tools for setting up mobile specific campaigns to maximize traffic and conversions. Major topics of the webinar will include the mobile search landscape and how to optimize mobile campaign structure. Specifically, Anjali and Bon will discuss keyword selection, ad creative and click to call options, mobile landing pages, and analytics and reporting.

To register, click here. Dial in for a the latest and greatest mobile strategies from Google’s Mobile Search Ads Team!

Posted by, Anjali Vaidya, Mobile Account Manager at Google

Last week we shared tips for designing a great mobile experience for your business, encouraging marketers to customize their website for a mobile user. Today we want to share an example of how to test content on mobile to maximize user engagement.

The American Red Cross recently ran a portion of their annual holiday campaign on mobile.  To take advantage of unique mobile call-to-actions, they offered visitors the choice to contribute by SMS, over the phone or with their credit card – making it as simple as possible for a mobile user to donate to the charity.

However, making it easy to convert was only the first step in optimizing for mobile. As part of the campaign, they created three mobile landing pages to compare what type of content resulted in highest click-through to one of their donation pages. By running three pages simultaneously, they could evaluate whether showing a photo gallery, video or recent news articles resulted in the highest donation interest.

This landing page experiment demonstrates how to test content and design on your mobile optimized website in order to maximize user response. We’ve put together the checklist below to assist advertisers ready to set up a mobile landing page test of their own.

Checklist for setting up a mobile landing page test:

1. Think about how your customers want to engage with your business on their phone. Should you offer the ability to get directions or does it make more sense to add a click-to-call button so they can connect with you directly? What mobile-unique actions are right for your business?
2. Evaluate what type of content is most relevant on mobile. By providing information that is relevant to a mobile user and also easy to access on a mobile phone, you will ensure your customers have a positive mobile experience.
3. Implement a mobile analytics solution in order to track and compare landing page performance based on the user response metrics that matter most to you.
4. Drive traffic to each of your landing pages and refine design based on what content results in highest user engagement. By experimenting and iterating based on what is working, you will create an experience that your mobile customers will remember and return to.

Posted by Vicky Homan, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

The American Red Cross name and emblem are used with its permission, which is no way constitutes an endorsement, express or implied, of any product, service, company, opinion or political position.

Mobile allows us to connect with those around us, find the nearest restaurants, and access information any time, any where.  It’s gone from an emerging medium to something that our advertisers and publishers continually ask us about.  At Google, our “mobile first” attitude helps push continuous innovation across our products, including ads.  So it’s no surprise that one of our AdWords favorites is a story that is uniquely mobile.  Let us know what you think!

Love at First Bite
A sweet ending to missed connections in the big city.

To watch more Search Stories, visit the Inside AdWords Blog for a full video playlist.

Posted by Lauren Usui, Mobile Ads Marketing Team

Over 19,000 people descended on Austin, TX for the SXSW Interactive Festival from March 11-16th. Google’s mobile team was there to learn how these tech savvy attendees use their mobile devices. We found that 98% of people we spoke with had a smartphone and they love their apps!  Check out the video to learn what apps people are using, what they think about ads in apps, and why they are excited about mobile.

Posted by the Mobile Ads Marketing Team

Even if you didn’t make it to the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco earlier this month, you can still get a taste of the action by checking out the video of our panel, “Turning Mobile Games into Moneymakers”.  Google’s mobile games guru, Charles Yim, interviewed Glu Mobile’s Mike Breslin, Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka and Zeptolab’s Misha Lyalin to learn the secrets to their success.  Find out how Rovio thinks about marketing Angry Birds.  Listen to Zeptolab explain the thought process they went through after Cut the Rope hit #1 in the app store in just 3 days.  Discover how Glu Mobile’s metric-driven approach translates into user value.  Check out the video of the panel in the GDC Vault here.

Posted by Keri Kandel, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

This month, we are excited to share with you new country insights from our Global Mobile Perspectives series.  Doug Yeum, Director of Business Development in South Korea, gives his thoughts on the latest mobile trends unique to South Korea. 

A great year for mobile
In 2010, South Korean consumers proved to device manufacturers and mobile operators that high end devices running iOS and Android would be big.  It’s almost an understatement as traffic from high-end devices in the AdMob network grew 6723% in 2010 over the previous year.  South Korea represents one of three countries that accounted for more than half of AdMob network ad requests last year in JAPAC.  Along with the launch of the iPhone, we’ve seen national brands with high brand awareness, like Samsung and LG, drive significant demand for devices running Android with aggressive in-country marketing.  We anticipate by the end of this year, 40% of all mobile devices in South Korea will be high end devices.

Early adopters
South Korea has a high rate of Internet penetration amongst both households and mobile devices.  Not only are South Koreans well connected, they are fast to adopt new technologies.  For example, new input methods like Voice Search have become very popular compared to other markets.  Even when we compare this growth to other markets, rates of adoption in South Korea have been staggering.  This has all happened in less than two years, which is faster than I’ve seen in any other region globally.

Emergence of data rich services
It’s no surprise that high-end devices have resulted in South Koreans spending more time browsing the web and using apps.  They now have access to cheaper, faster data services and we’ve begun to see increases in mobile video views on YouTube and the emergence of data-intensive services like mobile Voice over IP (VoIP).  I anticipate that we’ll continue to see network improvements for faster data services and increased availability and that data-driven activities will continue to be a large part of how users use their mobile devices.

Thinking mobile
In a recent study from Nielsen and KoreanClick, time spent on the PC has decreased from 43% to 33%, and South Koreans are now spending 23% of their time on mobile media consumption.  We anticipate mobile usage to continue to grow in the next 12 to 18 months, so it’s important for advertisers to think about mobile as a channel to reach their consumers.  Advertisers can easily extend their existing desktop campaigns to include mobile device targeting, or can develop new mobile specific marketing campaigns to reach users as they go mobile.

click to enlarge image

We have all seen the recent explosion of apps available to users of high end devices, especially with the popularity of Android.  South Korea is home to a number of global players in the mobile app space.  We anticipate more innovative apps to come in 2011 so now is the perfect time for advertisers to think about reaching users while they are engaged with apps.

Advertisers can learn more about how to reach users on mobile devices in South Korea by visiting the local website http://kr.admob.com/advertise.  For information for app developers looking to grow their business on mobile, visit kr.admob.com/appdevs.

Posted by Doug Yeum, Director of Business Development for South Korea

Starting out on mobile can be overwhelming. Where do you start? How do you prepare for your first campaign? These are big questions that we hear every day. This is the first in a series of posts on establishing your presence on the mobile web - before you even start your first advertising campaign.

An essential part of any digital marketing campaign is the post-click experience from advertising. Is your website easy to navigate? Are there any hurdles to conversion that you can remove? These are the same questions that you should consider for your mobile user experience.

We recently conducted a study that examined the mobile post-click experience of some of our largest advertisers. After looking at over 200 diagnostic points to measure ‘mobile readiness,’ including load time, device detection and mobile site optimization, we found that only 21% of Google’s largest advertisers have a website that is optimized for mobile. That’s 79% serving up a less than ideal experience for their mobile customers.

The good news is that it’s not too late to be early on mobile! Get ahead of your competition by creating a fantastic experience for your mobile customers. Start with these 4 tips for designing a great mobile website and check in next week for some real examples of how to test and build a mobile website that works for your business.

Four Tips for designing a mobile website:

1. Prioritize what’s important. Make it easy for customers on-the-go to call or find directions to your business. Easy navigation combined with relevant and interesting information lead to happy customers and more business.
   
2. Take advantage of mobile-specific functionality. Users can interact through touch, sound, sight and location on their mobile device. Create a mobile website with custom content that utilizes these capabilities.
   
3. Build for the mobile platform. Focus on easy navigation and remember to develop your website with touch screens in mind. Eliminating any website elements that don’t work or are slow to load on a mobile phone will keep users engaged.
   
4. Optimize, optimize, optimize.  Be sure to add mobile analytics to your website in order to evaluate and improve performance.

Posted by Vicky Homan, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

As mobile technology continues to accelerate, our phones are quickly becoming indispensable shopping tools. Whether researching a product or comparing prices before purchasing, 79% of US smartphone users have used their devices to help with shopping and 74% of those smartphone shoppers have made a purchase. *

This means that having a mobile strategy is key when engaging with these tech savvy, connected consumers. And this is especially true for advertisers focused on driving online and in-store conversions. To help you develop your mCommerce strategy, we’ve put together the following list of best practices for driving smartphone users to purchase from your site. Please note that these tips are geared towards ads running on high-end devices with full Internet browsers.

Extend your Online Brand Reputation to Mobile with Seller Ratings 
It’s no secret that having a great online reputation is essential to driving online conversions. With Seller Ratings on mobile, you can extend your online reputation from desktop to mobile devices and leverage the power of the mobile platform to drive conversions on your website.

The Seller Ratings extension enables mobile searchers to see merchants who are highly recommended by other shoppers. By showcasing relevant and useful rating information for your business, the extension can help differentiate you from your competition and guide potential customers to purchase from your site. In recent studies, campaigns with mobile Seller Ratings saw a 7.5% increase in clickthrough rates when compared to campaigns without this extension.

Seller Ratings are aggregated from merchant review sites all around the web and the extension will only show when a merchant's online store has a rating of four or more stars and at least 30 reviews. To learn more about Seller Ratings, please read this Help Center entry.

Take your Customers Directly to your Desired Conversion Path with Mobile Ad Sitelinks 
Ad Sitelinks enable direct navigation to specific pages of your website. Since navigating on the mobile web can still be difficult, sitelinks for mobile can be especially useful in taking customers directly to the desired conversion path on your site. For example, with sitelinks you can quickly guide your customers to the best selling products on your site or to your online store locator. Mobile users find this format particularly helpful and on average campaigns with mobile sitelinks see a 30% increase in clickthrough rates when compared to campaigns without sitelinks.

Right now a maximum of two sitelinks can appear on mobile devices with ads displaying two links across one line or stacked vertically on two lines. One-line sitelinks can show with the Click-to-Call Phone Extension and will display one link to your website alongside your phone number. One-line sitelinks can also show with the Seller Ratings Extension and will display your online store rating as well as two links to your website.

The quality of your ad will determine which variation of mobile Ad Sitelinks will show. Two-line sitelinks typically show for higher quality ads. To learn more about mobile sitelinks, please read this Help Center entry.

Drive Customers to your Store with Offer Ads
Are you running an in-store promotion? You can get the word out and incentivize customers to visit your store by placing a coupon right in your AdWords ads.

Mobile Ads with Offers enable advertisers to include special deals in their mobile search ads, allowing users to store coupons via email or SMS.  Ads will also display your phone number or your business location on a Google Map for Mobile so that customers have everything they need to go to your store, redeem the offer and make a purchase.  Mobile Ads with Offers are currently in beta, but we hope to make it broadly available soon.

Make it Easier For Customers to Contact you with Click-to-Call Ads
Whether you take orders over the phone or have a physical store location, you can ensure that your customers can easily connect with you by including your business phone number in your mobile search ads. Since users who make a call are showing interest in your product or service, they are more likely to make a purchase. With a call costing the same as a click to your ad,  this is a very cost-effective ad format for driving quality leads and conversions for your business.

Are you specifically focused on driving calls to your business? Try the Call-Only Creative, an enhancement to the Click-to-Call ad format that ensures your phone number is the only clickable part of your mobile ad.

Do you have a vanity phone number? Use the Vanity Phone Numbers feature of Click-to-Call to display an alphanumeric phone number in your mobile ad and ensure that customers easily remember how to get in touch with you.

To learn more about mobile ads with Click-to-Call please read this Help Center entry.

We hope you’ll find these tips helpful in driving conversions with your mobile campaigns and look forward to developing more mCommerce ad features for you in the future.

Posted by Anna Khesed, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team
*source: US Mobile Smartphone Consumer Study, Google & Ipsos, 2010

One of the three core principles of our mobile ads business is ‘inclusiveness’; advertisers and developers should have access to the tools they need  to reach users across many mobile platforms.  More than 50,000 mobile applications across iOS, Android, and webOS platforms currently use AdMob’s monetization tools, and today, we’re excited to further expand our developer offerings with the launch of our beta SDK for Windows Phone 7.

With the Windows Phone 7 SDK, developers can easily integrate advertising into their applications, control where the ads appear, and what types of ads are shown in their apps. The SDK supports text and banner ads with a variety of post click actions including opening a webpage and linking directly to the App Marketplace.

We have also taken steps to customize the ad experience for the look and feel of the Windows Phone 7 platform and make it easy for users to return to their application after engaging with the ad. Publishers can download the new SDK today by logging into their AdMob account and adding a site type of Windows Phone 7.

In addition to the new beta Windows Phone 7 SDK, we’re also updating our existing iOS and Android SDKs.   The new SDKs include enhanced HTML5 support for ad units that enable advertisers to create more engaging, richer ads and in turn, an improved user experience.  We’re also now supporting full screen interstitial formats for tablets on iOS and Android.

Publishers can download the new SDKs by logging into their accounts and selecting “Get Publisher Code” from the Manage Settings of their app.  We encourage all publishers to upgrade during their next development cycle to ensure they are using the latest version of the code and maximizing their revenue opportunities.

Posted by Mark Schaaf, Director of Engineering, Mobile Ads

“In the next twelve months, we’ll start to see mobile go from experimental budgets to core parts of media plans and hopefully just embedded into digital spend.”
-Marc Ruxin, Chief Innovation Officer at Universal McCann

On February 10, 2011 we hosted Think Mobile, a thought leadership event that brought together mobile industry leaders to discuss all things mobile.

Afterwards, we caught up with speakers from the event to find out their thoughts on the future of mobile as well as their favorite mobile trends and mobile apps. Watch as mobile industry leaders such as eBay’s Deepak Thomas, Expedia’s Joe Megibow, Universal McCann’s Marc Ruxin, Kleiner Perkins’ Matt Murphy, Google’s Jason Spero, Brendon Kraham, Jesse Haines and many more respond to our questions about mobile’s transformation on consumers and marketing. Visit the Think Mobile: Perspectives from Industry Thought Leaders playlist on our YouTube Channel.

Also, if you missed the Think Mobile live stream, be sure to check out the recorded session posted on our YouTube channel.

Posted by Suzanne Mumford, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

At Google’s Think Mobile Event last month, brands and agencies had a chance to reflect on recent successes they’ve had with mobile advertising. Jared Hopfer, Associate Director from Mobext, the mobile marketing arm of MPG and Media Contacts, shared his observations with us that day.

In the video below, Mr. Hopfer recounts how he worked with Google’s AdMob team to execute a mobile branding strategy for Volvo Cars of North America. To build excitement around the launch of Volvo’s S60 sedan, Mobext relied heavily on mobile interactive video ads. The campaign delivered significant brand lift and users spent a minute on average interacting with the video ads, akin to two 30-second spots.

As it turned out, the program became a pivotal point in how Volvo and Mobext used mobile advertising. Before the campaign, they viewed mobile primarily as a direct response channel to drive visitors to dealerships. In light of their recent successes, both agency and advertiser now see mobile as a branding mainstay and have added mobile to several upcoming branding and engagement programs. For more details on their story, download the full case study.

Posted by Ben Chung, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

Over 350 people attended Google’s sponsored session, “Turning Mobile Games into Money Makers,” at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco last week. Charles Yim, who manages strategic partnerships with the mobile games industry for Google, moderated the panel which included Glu Mobile's Mike Breslin, Rovio's Peter Vesterbacka and ZeptoLabs' Misha Lyalin.

Developers in the audience got to see a range of perspectives on monetizing, marketing, and distributing mobile games from the small upstart with 5 employees, Zeptolab to the publicly-traded Glu Mobile which is now 400 employees strong.  Each of these companies were building mobile games years before the iPhone and “apps” existed, so here are a few insights if you were not able to attend:

1. Start with a Great Game: It sounds simple, but Vesterbacka kept coming back to this point and the rest of the panel agreed.  Lyalin explained that building low-quality games undermines the entire industry not just the developer or the company.  One key is to create an emotional connection like with the friendly monster Om Nom in Cut the Rope; the player wants to make Om Nom happy so keeps playing.
2. Games as a Service: Breslin urged developers to think of mobile games as a service that needs to be constantly improved rather than a product that is shipped and sold.  The connectivity of a mobile device allows game developers to build an ongoing relationship with mobile gamers.  Similar to old arcade games, the goal is to have players “keep putting quarters in the machine” which is different from prepackaged console games.
3. Listen to Your Users: Lyalin believes recommendations and word of mouth are critical for success and believes in the net promoter score.  Keep a close eye on reviews and percent of users upgrading to new versions to ensure they like your content.
4. Build with Monetization in Mind: The type of game you have and relationship with your customers influences your opportunities for monetization.  You need to build the game thinking about where you might place ads or what mechanics will incentivize a player to pay for a virtual item or advanced features rather than try to go back and add these things in later.
5. Test and Iterate: Mike Breslin stressed the importance of “testing, testing, testing” to identify the optimal monetization strategy for each game.  All panelists closely measure conversions and uptake of virtual goods in addition to MAU, DAU, etc.
6. Scale Quickly: When asked what mistakes they made that other developers could learn from, Lyalin admitted that they did not scale fast enough.  He points out that it can all happen so fast on mobile.  Your game takes off and you hit your first $1 million, and it is exciting, but then you realize you need to reinvest a lot of that money back to take full advantage of the opportunity.

Looking ahead in 2011, the panelists are excited to see continued growth in mobile and new opportunities to monetize their games. Despite the limited reach of tablets today, all panelists were very bullish on the platform with Vesterbacka even predicting that they could highly marginalize consoles. Additionally, Mike Breslin reminded developers that, with the rapid growth in smartphone adoption, every 2-3 months you have an entirely new audience to attract to your game.  

For more information on Google’s products for developers visit the new Google Game Developer Central website.

Posted by Keri Kandel, Product Marketing Manager, AdMob

This post has been cross-posted from the Official Google Code Blog. 

Yesterday, the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) officially kicked off in San Francisco. From browser technologies to cloud storage solutions, Google has many products and services that can be useful to game developers. Until now, it was hard for developers to track down information on how Google can help them build, distribute and monetize their games. This is why we are excited to release Google Game Developer Central.

Google Game Developer Central provides an overview of Google products and services that are particularly relevant to game developers. You’ll be able to explore different platforms like Chrome, learn about technologies such as GWT, WebGL and HTML5, and check out monetization options like AdMob.

This is just the first iteration of Google Game Developer Central. In the next few months, we plan to add additional content to make this an even better resource for all game developers. If you’d like to give us feedback on how to improve the site, please join our developer forum or for those of you at GDC, stop by our booth on the expo floor. We look forward to meeting you in person!

By Ian Ni-Lewis, Game Developer Relations Team

This post was written by Avinash Kaushik, Google Digital Marketing Evangelist, and cross-posted from his Occam's Razor blog. 

Just when you thought you were finally getting more comfortable with website analytics and the metrics you report, here comes the massive explosion of mobile data!

At one level it is the normal impressions and clicks data, but on another level we are getting new data and metrics we normally don't use. We are going to have fun doing cool stuff, learning new things.

I have been spending some time with the Mobile Ads team at Google to try and understand what is innovative about mobile (oh my god so much!) and what implications are on measurement (loads!).

In this blog post I want to talk about just one specific ad unit, the Search / Display click-to-call ad, and how it is cool, useful, and immensely measureable in sexy ways.

Couple of quick caveats:

1. Click-to-Call ads are available in 223 countries, but Call Metrics (more on this below) is still in limited release, in the US only, so some of you might not have access to it. This will change over time.

2. Some of the screens and setup stuff might change as the product evolves, from what you see below. It should only get better.

3. My blog has a very finite width. so in many places I've cropped the reports to make them more clear for you. Please don't worry if when you use the tool you don't see exactly what you see below. On any tab in AdWords just click on the button called Columns and then click on Customize Columns. You can now add and remove metrics and prettify things!

Read more »