Google recently held its annual education conference in San Francisco, but it was the conference named Learn with Google that particularly stuck out during the packed and fun-filled event. The Learn With Google full-day seminar gave participants unprecedented access to some of Google’s smartest minds. Several of the sessions presented throughout the day focused on mobile marketing and how to gain prominent attention and rankings in a multi-screen world. If you want to improve your mobile marketing in Google, you will want to pay attention to a few of the takeaways from this year’s SESSF.
1. Always Be Present for Customers
The most recent Google updates for mobile marketing have made it so that all of the search results are pretty much geared for mobile devices. Google makes the Android operating system, after all. With the millions of people around the world who have Android phones, Google needs to make sure that all search results are optimized for any search and during any time of the day.
And since your customers could be searching at any time of day on their mobile devices, Matt Lawson, Director of Search Ads Marketing at Google recommends that you always be there for your customers. He recommends utilizing bids, instead of merely raising your budget, if you want to manage your advertising expenditures. He left the examples of using bids in order to tune performance according to mobile users’ locations, times of day, the mobile devices they happen to be using, and so on. This way, as he puts it, you can reach “the right people, in the right place, at the right time.”
2. Don’t Focus on CPA – Profit Should Be Your Primary Concern
Other Google updates for mobile marketing have made it so that more mobile sites are allowed to commandeer the top spots of the search results. This is why Lawson recommends that, for companies looking to improve profits, companies should focus on profit and not CPA if they want to measure success. He recommends taking advantage of real-time bidding strategies and to be flexible, testing higher positions along the way, if you want to find the optimal balance.
3. Make Buying Easy
With over 50 billion apps already downloaded from the Google Play store, you know that several Google updates for mobile marketing were going to involve apps, and several discussions at SESSF did, too. If you are creating a mobile app and you plan to make it available via Google Play, Adam Singer, Google’s Product Marketing Manager, recommends that you learn how to measure your app before you release it to the public. He suggests that you learn to understand your customers and how they will use your app if you hope to monetize and maximize profits.
4. Focus on Engagement
Singer suggested that you focus on micro conversions (opening a screen, for instance), as well as macro conversions (such as completing a purchase) in order to better understand how your prospects and customers interact with your app and move around within the internal framework. He says to go beyond the typical Key Performance Indicators (KPI), such as the numbers of followers and visitors, and even beyond mere revenue and leads in order to combine a combination of micro and macro conversion data that lead to the most favorable outcomes.
5. Platforms and Tools Should Coincide and Track Users’ Habits
Even with all the Google updates for mobile marketing, few mobile users spend all their online time on a Google platform. This is why Matthew Eichner, Managing director of DoubleClick Search Americas for Google, says that it is now much harder to track users and conversions now that mobile users spend so much time on so many different places. This is why he recommends that marketers ensure that all platforms they use integrate seamlessly with one another and to use those platforms’ tracking abilities to obtain a more complete picture of each customer’s journey through your sales funnel.
6. Mobile Bid Modifier
One of the most popular Google updates for mobile marketing happened in 2011 when the search giant launched their HowToGoMo Initiative. It was clear then and it’s even clearer now that Google is urging everyone to go mobile and the world has largely done so on its own. It’s difficult to find anyone who doesn’t have a smartphone of some kind. Even farmers in rural areas are now Googling their most pressing questions on their mobile devices; many of them with Androids. This is why it pays to listen to Google when it comes to going mobile for your customers.
The point is, Google wants you to have a mobile site. The search engine wants your site to be mobile friendly so that you can provide the best experience possible to your mobile device using-public. Yet Shilpi Verma, one of the Google speakers at the SESSF, said that even if you haven’t optimized for mobile, Google suggests that you still use mobile bid modifiers for what he calls “Mobile Remarketing”.
He says that marketers have 14 opportunities daily to connect with online users, and that for every 1.5 hours a user spends online, they only spend five minutes searching in Google. This is why Verma suggests that you use one of the other Google updates for mobile marketing – enhanced bidding features – that use time, location and device data in order to get the most from your audience and marketing efforts.
Use these tidbits from the latest SES conference in San Francisco to improve your mobile marketing game.
