Category Archives: Mobile Ads

Reach New Customers While They Use Mobile Apps Through Google’s Mobile App Campaigns

What Are Mobile App Campaigns?

Imagine you’re selling a fitness product that helps people lose weight and be healthy. Your target customers are probably already looking into fitness solutions and programs. Many of them are using mobile apps to log their calories or track daily activity, or apps that help with nutrition. Now imagine being able to promote your product to someone who’s logging their daily food intake on their mobile app. You can do that easily through Google AdWords with a “Mobile apps” campaign type.

Mobile apps is a strategy that allows you to show text and image ads on the Display Network to mobile device users. Your ads show within an app as potential customers use apps on their mobile devices. You can select app categories to show ads on, or you can research and choose specific apps that you already have in mind.

Mobile Apps Campaign Set-Up

To get started, create a new campaign, choosing “Display Network only” as your campaign type.

Choose your target countries, languages, set a budget, bids, and customize your other campaign settings.

Next, you’ll get to choose your targeting. You’ll have the option to select specific “Mobile app categories” or “Search all apps” to choose specific apps.

You can narrow your targeting further by age or gender to only show ads to specific age groups or only to women, for example, if that is your target audience.

Or, you can refine targeting with interests and remarketing categories. For example, you can show ads to customers using apps that have been to your website before but did not convert.

Once you have chosen your targets, create ads and your campaign is ready to run!

Click-To-Call in AdWords Can Make Your Phones Ring

If you are a business that values calls more than website visits, you should be taking advantage of click-to-call mobile features in AdWords. With click-to-call, when people are searching on their mobile devices, they have the option to call you instead of clicking through to your website, thus saving customers an extra step and helping you get more engaged prospects.

To get started, I recommend creating a separate campaign that’s opted into mobile devices only. Next, you will want to go to the ‘Ad Extensions’ tab in your campaign management section, and select with ‘Location Extensions’ or ‘Call Extensions.’ The screenshot below shows an example of ‘Call Extensions’

You do have the option to enable the ‘Call-Only’ format so that only the phone number is clickable when your ad is shown on mobile devices capable of making phone calls. Please note that call-only phone extensions don’t work in conjunction with enhanced CPC or CPA bidding, so you should use Maximum CPC bidding if you’d like to take advantage of this feature. There are also issues with call-only creatives showing on BlackBerry devices, so you might want to target iPhone and Android specifically if you go with the call-only feature.

The calls cost the same as a click, but make sure you increase your bids so that your ads are showing in the top positions for maximum visibility on mobile devices. I also suggest you consider enabling ad scheduling so your mobile campaigns only run when you have someone available to take calls.

Optimize your Google AdWords campaigns for mobile

According to recent data, 30% of US of mobile owners are accessing their internet browsers on their phones and mobile is one of fastest growing media channels. Advertisers need to take advantage of the various mobile options that Google AdWords provides. Are your PPC campaigns optimized for it? Here are three tips for success:

Create a separate campaign opted into mobile devices only and opted out of desktop and and laptop devices. This will allow you greater control and an easier overview of how mobile is performing for you. On your Google AdWords campaign settings page, under Networks and devices, choose to opt your campaign into iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers
Enable Phone extensions to display your number on iPhones and other mobile devices with full internet browsers. Calls are often more valuable than online leads and this feature allows you to side-step the website visit option and get that call right away, increasing the chance of converting a visitor to a lead.
Create WAP mobile ads. In my experience they get better CTRs and lower CPCs. WAP mobile ads are shorter versions of your full text ads, optimized for the online browsing experience and with a click-to-call option. Mobile text ads contain two lines of text with 18 characters per line. The display URL is limited to 20 characters only. Consider leaving out the www. if you are running out of space. To create a mobile ad, go to your mobile campaign, click tab Ads -> New Ad and choose the WAP mobile option from the drop down.