Cross-posted on the Politics and Elections Blog


Earlier this year, we introduced “Four Screens to Victory”, a framework for political campaigns that outlined how Google can help make the web work for candidates and issues groups up and down the ballot. With these digital platforms, campaigns can build their organizations, define the issues, persuade the electorate and - importantly - get the vote out and win the moment that matters in November on Election Day.

Access to political information no longer comes from one place - or one screen. In just the four years since the last presidential election, the continued growth of the web and the proliferation of mobile devices has radically transformed when, where, and how voters access political information. 

The numbers are in, and savvy political campaigns need to take notice. The rules of reaching voters have changed and new approaches are warranted because: 

• More than 80% of eligible voters are online
• Similarly, 83% of mobile phone owners are registered voters
• 1 out of every 3 likely voters in November say that they didn’t watch tv in the past week
• Voters are spending more media time on their mobile devices than newspapers & magazines combined

(Click the infographic below to get a larger version)

If you’re as inspired as we are by some of the data and the implications on your own political campaign, check out the“Four Screens to Victory” site to spark some ideas of your own and see how you can make the web work for your campaign. 

Posted by: David Kaufman, Google Politics & Elections Team

Smartphone game Fishing Joy has become a wild success for Chinese mobile game developer Chukong Co., Inc, driving over 80 million downloads to date and earning revenues of over 5 million yuan in just the first 3 months of release. In order to make the app successful, Chukong used click-to-download AdMob ads to promote game downloads while generating revenue from serving AdMob in-app ads on Fishing Joy. AdMob’s click-to-download ad format allowed Chukong to send users who clicked on their ad directly to the App Store, reducing the number of steps to download the app and thereby increasing conversions.

Chukong also took advantage of AdMob’s latest feature which blocks advertisements from users who have already downloaded Fishing Joy, displaying them only to those who have not, improving marketing efficiency and reducing promotional costs.  By using AdMob to promote the app to smartphone users as well as run in-game ads to make money, AdMob provided an all-around solution for both promotion and monetization.

“Due to the increasing number of game developers and ‘knock-offs,’ the success of mobile phone games increasingly relies on marketing and promotion,” says Chen Haozhi, CEO of Chukong. “The key is in the selection and use of the right promotional channels. We chose to make a significant investment in AdMob. Currently, only AdMob can assure developers that they will have predictable promotional costs. Plus, AdMob provides excellent return on investment.”

From May to September of 2011, Chukong invested 70% of its promotional budget in AdMob. With AdMob’s help, Chukong:

• Ranked as the number one free download in iTunes in 33 countries and as the top grossing app in 18 countries in just 112 days after release
• Attracted over 80 million downloads and 4.5 million daily active users to-date
• Grew company from 30 to 200 employees
• Attracted ¥ 100 million in foreign financial backing
• Reduced promotional costs and increased efficiency by targeting only potential new users
• Acquired new users for as little as 10 cents per user

For Chukong, AdMob has helped overcome the challenges surrounding paid software promotion models in China. In 2012, Chukong expects to invest more than $1 million (US) in AdMob to continue to reel in more customers.

For more information, read the full case study here.

Posted by Kevin Otsuka, APAC Mobile Ads Associate Product Marketing Manager

Many businesses are realizing the importance of a mobile-friendly site and need help finding a trusted vendor to help them build one. GoMo's vendor directory has provided this information to businesses looking to go mobile -- and now, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has developed a more robust way to help businesses find the right vendor for their mobile site building needs. This new resource is designed to help the entire industry: businesses, agencies, and marketers.

As such, Google has sunsetted our US vendor directory. We'll no longer be managing and hosting a GoMo vendor directory; instead, we’re connecting businesses with the IAB’s Mobile Vendor Directory, which includes the vendors that were in the GoMo directory and many more. Check it out.

If you’re interested in learning more about becoming a vendor directory member, visit the IAB: http://www.iab.net/mobilevendors.

Happy mobilizing!

Posted by: Suzanne Mumford, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Smartphones and tablets are changing how people shop for goods and services. More than ever, consumers have near constant access to information from their mobile devices. This global trend opens up new opportunities for businesses to influence purchasing decisions -- at anytime or place, at home or on the go.

To help businesses reach customers while they’re shopping, today we’re launching our new Google Shopping experience, built on Product Listing Ads, for tablets and smartphones in the United States. Just like on desktop computers, Google Shopping for mobile makes it easier for your customers to find and compare different products. Product images enable shoppers to make quick visual comparisons while browsing products. Search refinements, now on tablet devices, help to surface the brands, features and price point they want, so shoppers can easily buy the product they want from the merchant of their choice.

 

We designed this new shopping experience to fit naturally with the activities people love to do on their smartphones and tablets. For example, tablets are largely used at home, and often while watching TV. In fact, more than a third of tablet owners surveyed said they used tablets to look up products they saw on the big screen at home1. These consumers are making more and more purchases on their tablets. We see similar trends amongst smartphone owners. Our recent Our Mobile Planet research found that one third of Americans (34%) have made a purchase on their smartphones2, and across all global markets surveyed in the study, 62% of people who’ve made a mobile purchase do so at least on a monthly basis.

Product Listing Ads can be set up in AdWords, after you’ve linked your Merchant Center account. To ensure that mobile and tablet shoppers can view your Product Listing Ads, make sure that your campaigns are targeting mobile and tablet devices with full browsers.

To help online merchants drive sales across smartphones and tablets, as well as desktop computers, we’re offering some incentives:

• Both new and existing merchants who create Product Listing Ads by August 15, 2012 will automatically receive a monthly credit for 10% of their total Product Listing Ad spend through the end of 2012; and
• Existing Google Product Search merchants who are new to Product Listing Ads can receive $100 AdWords credit toward Product Listing Ads if they fill out a form before August 15, 2012.

Learn more how to get started with Google Shopping across smartphones, tablets or desktop computers, visit: www.google.com/ads/shopping


Posted by Anurag Agrawal, Product Manager, Mobile Ads

(1) “State of the Media”, Nielsen, April 2012
(2) Our Mobile Planet, Google, 2012

Last week, La Fourchette (http://m.lafourchette.com) won Google France’s first annual French Mobile Site of the year competition. This competition, organized in partnership with french business media Les Echos and the Mobile Marketing Association France, rewarded the best mobile optimized sites in France.

La Fourchette, an online service that enables its customers to find deals in local restaurants, meets the 10 mobile site best practices defined in the GoMo initiative. Now available in 14 different countries throughout the world, GoMo aims to show the importance of having a mobile-friendly site to help connect with customers and increase sales. Reserving a restaurant through La Fourchette is done only with a few clicks thanks to an efficient geo-localization system.

The mobile site of La Fourchette - winner in the Media & Local category & Mobile site of the year

(http://m.lafourchette.com)

The jury, co-chaired by Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux (President of OMEA-TELECOM Virgin Mobile), Benoit Corbin (President of the Mobile Marketing Association France) and David Barroux (Editor in chief, Les Echos) awarded the 10 companies that won the category prizes. 'La Fourchette' also won the category prize for Media & Local. 9 other businesses were rewarded for their outstanding mobile websites:

• AUTO: Renault (http://m.renault.fr) by Phonevalley agency
• RETAIL: Interflora (http://mobile.interflora.fr/) by Useradgents agency
• ENTERTAINMENT: PMU (http://mobile.pmu.fr) by Useradgents agency
• MEDIA & LOCAL: La Fourchette (http://m.lafourchette.com) built internally
• PUBLISHERS: Marie Claire (http://m.marieclaire.fr) by MC2M agency
• FINANCE & INSURANCE: Assurland (http://assurland.mobi) built internally
• FMCG: Clarins (http://m.clarins.fr) by Ecommera agency
• PUBLIC SECTOR: GDF Suez (http://gdfsuez-dolcevita.mobi) by Backelite agency
• TECHNO: SFR (http://m.sfr.fr) by Nealite agency
• TRAVEL: Citer (http://m.citer.fr) by Apocope agency

In parallel with the competition, any company without a mobile site could enter a game to win a grant to help them develop one. The French insurance company, Amaguiz, was the lucky winner of the draw held on June 27th.

Les Echos, the Mobile Marketing Association France and Google France partnered to launch this first contest of its kind in France. This joint effort underlines our will to mobilize French advertisers, on the challenges and opportunities of the mobile web. France, just like so many other countries, is seeing strong mobile growth, which a lot of companies are still not aware of. This initiative perfectly fits the core message of our worldwide initiative ‘Go Mobile’ - in France, 48% of smartphone users surf the web more than once everyday*.

To learn more about how to mobilize your site, check out our French GoMo initiative Mobilisez-vous or GoMo in the US.

Posted by: Benjamin Quesnel, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google France

* Ipsos, MMA, Google, “Our Mobile Planet”, 2012

We recently introduced The Mobile Playbook: The Busy Executive’s Guide to Winning with Mobile, a new resource that offers Google’s perspective on how to strategically approach mobile.

With 66% of the population accessing Internet every day on their smartphone (source: Google and Ipsos Our Mobile Planet: Understanding the Mobile Consumer, May 2012), and never leaving home without it, businesses that make mobile a central part of their strategy will benefit from the opportunity to engage the new constantly connected consumer.

On July 16, at the IAB Mobile Marketplace event, Jesse Haines, Head of Mobile Ads Marketing at Google, will be presenting a workshop where she will walk you through the 5 questions every business should be asking in order to win with mobile. She will also share the right plays for a winning mobile strategy straight from The Mobile Playbook.

The workshop will start at 2.40 and will be filled with great learnings on mobile marketing. This event will be a chance to learn from other brands, agencies, and mobile gurus. We hope to see you there on July 16th at the Crowne Plaza Hotel --Times Square, Manhattan.

Posted by Julie Pottier, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Mobile introduces exciting new opportunities for measuring the success of marketing campaigns, but connecting consumers’ mobile activities with advertisers’ business outcomes can be challenging.  Increasingly, advertisers are redefining their direct response marketing strategies for mobile in order to more accurately measure the success of mobile campaigns.  We recently sat down with Kerri Smith, Director of Mobility at iProspect, a leading, global digital marketing agency to discuss this topic.  

Google: How are you helping your clients to assign dollar values to mobile all along the funnel?

Kerri:  This really depends on the client.  In most cases, clients are assigning value based on a number of factors used to determine the lifetime value of a customer.  For example, one of our brands assigns an average order value (AOV) on app downloads based on the usage they’ve seen through analytics and resulting revenue from their aggregated app users.   For another brand, call extensions have proven very effective, though it’s been difficult to track conversions and resulting revenue as the consumer is taken offline.  Therefore, we use an equation that allows us to measure the likelihood of an actual conversion. Knowing the average call duration, which indicates level of interest, and the agent conversion rate, the brand helped to formulate the following equation:

6 minute call duration = an interested consumer

Agents convert 30% of interested consumers

Interested Consumers * 30% = # of conversions

This allows us to quantify a return where 1-to-1 measurement is difficult, and to understand the impact the channel is having on the brand’s overall business.

Google: What types of clients have you seen be successful with understanding the value of these micro- conversions?

Kerri:  We’ve seen our retail brands be the first to embrace these micro-conversions - especially in the case of location-based responses, due in large part to the known “intent to visit” derived from these and previous testing.  We’ve been able to use coupons to measure the revenue opportunity in stores from mobile and to prove the value in attributing dollars to these actions.  Retailers have seen enough of these trends and subsequent lifts in revenue to value these actions.

Google: What success stories or best in class examples can you share?

Kerri:  One of our clients had a goal of directing mobile users to their app download page to increase conversions, and we worked with Google to help them run a two month test of Mobile App Extensions.  During the test, we disabled all sitelinks, location extensions and product extensions in order to focus on the primary goal of driving app downloads.  The test showed phenomenal results: 92 downloads, 89:1 ROI and a 334% lift in ROI when they began attributing value to app downloads.

Google: What's iProspect POV on where mobile is going?

Kerri:  Where is mobile not going?  Mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) have already become so ingrained in our everyday lives that the full impact is literally boundless.  Mobile is the channel that connects all others.  It doesn’t fit in the traditional conversion funnel -- it runs alongside it, involved at every stage.  This presents a challenge to brands who still segment advertising channels with separate budgets and directives instead of focusing on how they impact each other.  Mobile will highlight the need to evaluate all channels together to create a truly integrated approach - one that enhances the consumer’s interaction with the brand.  Applying a value to the multitude of “responses” available in mobile is just the first step.  Advertisers will also need to evaluate the impact of those responses relative to other brand initiatives (both online and offline) in order to determine the role each plays in contributing to their bottom line.  The ubiquity of mobile will force advertisers to redefine their approach and how they measure success.


Posted by: Samantha Podos Nowak, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

As more of your competitors Go Mo, building a mobile-friendly site becomes more of a priority for your business. Over the past two years alone, mobile search traffic has increased five-fold. Customers are searching for your business from their mobile phones, and you need to engage them with a mobile experience designed for completing on-the-go tasks from their small screens. Recently many businesses have been asking us about an emerging trend among web developers—responsive design—and if they should use it. While we believe that building a separate mobile website is an appropriate solution for certain businesses, it’s also important to understand how responsive design might fit into your plans to Go Mo.

What is responsive design? It is a website design technique that allows you to create a single website that will adapt to the device on which it’s being viewed, whether it’s a laptop, smartphone or tablet. A site built with responsive design will automatically resize for different devices, but it is up to you to prioritize the content that matters most to the mobile user. For example, a mobile user might need to quickly find your phone number or directions, whereas a tablet user might want a simpler way to make couch-surfing purchases. A site built using responsive design could prioritize click-to-call and click-to-map buttons, while the tablet site would focus on simplifying the shopping cart. For the technical details on how responsive design works for building mobile-friendly sites, read this blog post from the Google webmaster team.

Download here.

So how do I know if I should build a separate mobile website or use responsive design?  
Here are some guidelines to help you decide what makes sense for your business:

Download here.

If I decide responsive design is a better fit for my business, do I have to build my site from scratch?
Not necessarily. A sophisticated web developer might be able to adapt an existing site with responsive design, but there will still be costs in terms of time and budget.

Will a site built with responsive design have more than one URL?
No. A site built with responsive design will have the same URL for desktop, mobile and tablets. When building a separate mobile optimized site, typically there is a different mobile url, but the users will be taken there automatically as long as your desktop site is enabled with the auto redirect code.

How much does it cost to use responsive design for mobile?
Prices vary across developers and agencies. We recommend reaching out to a developer and/or agency for help on getting started.

Responsive design can definitely minimize long term maintenance of your site, but many businesses can effectively connect with their customers with a separate mobile-friendly site. If you have the technical resources and a clear business need, then responsive design is a more advanced way to make your site mobile-friendly. No matter how you go about it, you need to ensure you are designing for mobile first, and engaging your customers when they're using their mobile phones to search for your business.

For additional resources on the value of mobile, testing your site and finding developers to help you build your mobile-friendly site, visit howtogomo.com.

Posted by Jessica Sapick, Associate Product Marketing Manager