Are you wasting money with your Pay-Per-Click campaigns?

Are you wasting money with your Pay-Per-Click campaigns?

If you don’t have a mobile landing page, yes.

Google is by far the most dominant PPC advertiser online today.  Buried within your campaign setup is a small checkbox that asks you whether you want your campaign to run on mobile.  If you are clicking “yes” without a mobile landing page, you are wasting your money.

Your price-per-click will increase, without any benefit to you.  In July 2010, Google owned a faintly absurd 98.29% of the mobile search market[1].  It knows the mobile market well, and recommends that you have a custom mobile landing page to direct mobile users to.  Yet, why do so many companies ignore this, and still click that little button for mobile campaigns?

When a mobile user hits a landing page designed to be viewed by a desktop browser, they most often leave due to the generally bad experience of viewing a desktop site on a mobile device.  This is not conjecture; it is backed up by a rash of statistics on mobile bounce rates.

Traditionally, advertisers have had to design separate campaigns for desktop and mobile devices.  The extra effort needed to execute integrated campaigns, along with a dearth of knowledge and experience has led to campaigns that perform poorly on mobile.  This may have led to companies abandoning dedicated mobile campaigns, after seeing their “ineffectiveness.”  However, with the mobile market maturing and market leaders like Google acknowledging mobile’s impact, mobile campaigns are gaining traction.

Mobify helps to make mobile campaigns easy.  Once your website is mobified and your redirect in place, you only need to create 1 campaign for desktop and mobile.  Click the option in Google AdWords to display your ads on mobile devices, and Mobify’s redirection of mobile devices will take care of the rest.  The mobile user unfriendly, bounce-happy landing pages?  Mobify automatically detects incoming browsers and shows them a page designed specifically for their device.  This means desktop browsers get desktop pages and mobile browsers get mobile pages.  It’s as simple as that.  Now, one campaign can easily span desktop and mobile with no added effort.  Our A/B testing has proven its effectiveness over and over.

Threadless.com, the leading online retailer of crowd-sourced t-shirt designs, has a strong AdWords presence.  However, their campaign is identical across all platforms.  This is less backend effort on their part, and is effective across mobile and desktop.  The net result?  Their mobile clickthrough rates and mobile completions have more than doubled.

Businesses must tailor strategies to include the rapid growth of the mobile space.  With mobile browsing set to surpass desktop browsing by 2015, mobile advertising has to move past its nascent phase to properly capture the market, and running a proper mobile campaign is a good first step.