Will you increase mobile ad spend? Have you already?

JessicaRuth · Nov 17, 2014

As mobile search volume rose 120 percent, one-third of last quarter's paid search spend went to mobile, according to research from Covario, a San Diego, California search marketing agency.

Will you or have you already changed your mobile ad spend?

How has that worked for you?

What advice would you share for those who haven't done any mobile advertising?

craigh · Nov 17, 2014

My advice is that if we all don't increase our spend, the industry average CPC won't go up.
That can work.. right?

yagoparamo · Nov 18, 2014

Jess,

Funny that I find most dealers search themselves only on a PC so mobile PPC or for that matter long tail SEO/etc is not on their radar.

Those who pay attention to it are gaining fast.

craigh · Nov 18, 2014

^ this is what we find almost everywhere.
If we setup actual, custom-tailored mobile ads the response is great.

I often find mobile campaign that point to desktop only pages (non-responsive) or pages that 404 entirely.
Taking over other people's AdWords is always interesting - seeing them spend thousands on sending customers to 404s and outdated pages.

mwpistell · Nov 18, 2014

I run mobile campaigns on all my accounts.

All of my Cobalt client's mobile sites have been seeing enormous returns on visitor quality this year, and their user engagement metrics like time on site and pages per visit often out preform desktop - an unusual feat. I ran a quick analysis on this last month with one of my Cobalt clients to see if I could spot trends in mobile traffic and the results impressed me. Here's a 12 month graph of PPC sources by device and their associated performance:

Mobile's month-over-month numbers continue to rise, but this fact alone is not really a surprise. However, the mobile users interact with the site very well and convert at higher rates than any other device. It's very unusual to see a site with mobile traffic that outperforms desktop in terms of visitor quality. Cobalt does an excellent job building mobile sites, this looks like an interesting case study.

I've already adjusted the mobile bids in my AdWords accounts so that my clients appear more for this increasingly lucrative audience. Mobile visitors were 19% of total paid traffic in February for my clients, and 8 months later in October they now account for 38%.

MikeHaeg · Nov 19, 2014

yagoparamo said:
Those who pay attention to it are gaining fast.

As someone not technically in the business of mobile advertising at the dealership, I'm curious as to what is causing the slow move toward grasping the power of mobile? Is it the same hesitation businesses had with adopting a (gasp) website?

yagoparamo · Nov 20, 2014

I think most of the time the PPC company is making the commission anyway so... why create more work

JessicaRuth · Jul 14, 2015

Well, here you have it:

Mobile Search Spend Increases 71% from last year.

Full article

craigh · Jul 15, 2015

Interesting that they say Remarketing is shrinking. I will have to do some thinking about that and why it would be happening if it's still the dominant avenue. Maybe remarketing doesn't work as well on mobile?

Either way, thanks for interrupting TrueCarRefresh with something else

Kelly Wilson · Jul 16, 2015

Thanks for the great thought nugget Jess! I've been deep in the trenches over the past few months. Looking at our mobile traffic, I'm working on converting to a responsive site. We did a good deal of mobile display and it's not performing too well. I think it may be more the ads than the platform. We've seen 11% of desktop traffic and 2% of tablet traffic moving to mobile y:y on our group site and moved 15% of our budget to keep the spend equal to the traffic.