The ad used the display url: TheirSite.com/Mobile.

I tweeted about this; and most people didn’t think it was a great display URL. Now, it could be that they are all on Andriod or iPhones. As these phones can render pages fairly well even if they are not designed for mobile devices, that might not be an intriguing display URL.

My poor BlackBerry sometimes has an awful time rendering sites that don’t have mobile components – so I thought the difference might lie in the type of phone someone has (the BlackBerry’s browser pales in comparison to just about any other smartphone – my iTouch and gaming consoles have better browsers).

This type of thinking usually leads me down the path of testing.

The total available searches on mobile devices is still very low compared to computers, just take a look at the differences in visitors by OS on this site:

The dropoff is pretty steep once you move past just a few operating systems.

However, you can’t just ignore more than 70,000 total mobile visits.

So the test was pretty simple three display URLs:

• TheSite.com
• TheSite.com/Mobile
• TheSite.com/ProductFolder
• TheSite.com/iPhone (only shown to iPhone users)

Note: the site being tested is different than the above site, but similar in traffic; however, I can’t show this particular site’s analytics per owner’s request.

Here’s the CTR by OS (I threw out some of the data because the number of clicks and impressions was too low to gain any conclusions; and the iPad is not a phone).

The iPhone users obviously like seeing iPhone in the display URL the most, and a more typical /ProductFolder ad second. That’s not too surprising.

The Andriod owners surprised me. They liked /Mobile as much as the /ProductFolder. I did not have enough data to segment out Android by operating system (so Android 1.6 and Android 2.2 are lumped together); and that could be the cause of the CTR difference.

The BlackBerry owners felt comforted by the /Mobile (and I don’t blame them).

The differences in CTR between the display URLs is significant (much more dramatic than some of my testing). Rarely do you see a 0.8% and a 2.2% CTR in the same ad group for search (this was not a well known brand, so TheSite.com often doesn’t work well).

This is just one test, and the data set wasn’t huge – so don’t think this is how you should design your ads.

This type of test should give you the framework for designing mobile display URL tests.

Mobile traffic is still very low (or non-existent) for some. However, mobile traffic increases every single month.

Understanding your visitor behavior now will help you anticipate how to reach them when they start searching for you on a mobile device.

Case Study on Testing Display URLs for Mobile Phones is a post from: Certified Knowledge

The article walks through:

• Reaching users on iPhones, Blackberry Storms, or phones will full internet browsers
• Reaching users who are using a phone without a full internet browser, such as a Blackberry Curve or Razor
• How to create a mobile website
• Previewing mobile results
• Conversion tracking

If you are running mobile campaigns, or thinking about testing a mobile PPC campaign, the article is a nice primer to get you started.

Enjoy Beginners Guide To Creating Mobile AdWords Campaigns.

Beginners Guide To Creating Mobile AdWords Campaigns is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Hello,

We’re sorry to inform you that, beginning May 6, we will no longer host AdWords Business Pages for mobile ads. As of that date, the product will be retired due to low usage. This means that all mobile Business Pages content will be removed, and any ads you have that link to an AdWords Business Page for mobile will stop running.
 

To continue running mobile ads after May 6, you’ll need to direct them to a different mobile landing page or to a phone number. For suggestions on how to create a new mobile landing page for your ads, visit http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=138513. For directions on creating a “click-to-call” mobile ad that links to your phone number, visit http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=32541.
 

We decided on this change after much consideration, and we apologize for any inconvenience it might cause you.
 

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team

As a reminder, here’s a guide to make a quick WordPress mobile site if you want to either move your Google mobile page, or test out mobile advertising.

AdWords Mobile Pages Officially Close is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Personally, the pages weren’t useful as you didn’t have much control over the formatting, and couldn’t really make a nice mobile page.

The easiest way to make a mobile site is to first install WordPress. Secondly, install WordPress Mobile Edition plug-in.

If you are using WordPress as your website publishing platform:

• FTP & Enable the plug-in
• Do not make the mobile template the default template. The plug-in will detect if the mobile version needs to be triggered.
• Customize the mobile template as much as you desire (you can upload an image, change the navigation to your main pages, etc)

If you are not using WordPress as your website publishing platform:

This is the low tech approach to a mobile page. This option should only be used if:

• You don’t want to pay someone to design your site for mobile devices
• You don’t have the budget for a full mobile compliant site
• You just need a site to let a visitor know your locations, phone number, and basic information etc on a mobile phone
• You want a cheap option to display a mobile page while your testing out the effectiveness of mobile advertising

WordPress is a blogging platform, but in this case we’re just using it for a few mobile pages; here’s my suggestions

• Create a subdomain (like mobile.yoursite.com)
• Install WordPress in that subdomain
• Install WordPress Mobile Edition plug-in
• Use the mobile edition theme as your default theme
• Customize the mobile edition to fit your website’s overall color and design scheme

You will need to be able to create a subdomain, mysql database, and have ftp access to your site. Pretty much everyone using Plesk or cPanel for their hosting control panel have these abilities.

Final notes on time:

If you’ve never played with WordPress before, making your site mobile compatible will take a couple hours. The installation is easy. The control panel is also easy to navigate. WordPress is very easy to use. However, since it is a new system that you’ve never seen – allow 2-3 hours of time.

If you’ve used WordPress before, making your site Mobile compatible will take 5 minutes of time, plus however long you wish to spend customizing the theme after installation.

If you do not want to use WordPress…

There are other easy ways to create mobile pages. Most of them are 3rd party hosting systems. As I’m a huge fan of controlling your site, I’d recommend you host this yourself if possible.

If you cannot, then browse around the web and choose one of the many options currently available. If you like it, please post a comment here (or contact me) so we can recommend other good mobile hosting options. Thank you.

AdWords Retiring Google Mobile Business Pages – Quick Mobile Site Creation Guide is a post from: Certified Knowledge

The change did give you more control in your campaign settings. You can now have an ad that is displayed to just desktops and laptop computers, or to just iPhones and devices with browsers, or both. Of course, this setting is at the campaign level, thus every single ad in your campaign will follow those rules.

If you wanted, you can now create one ad for just people on mobile devices with full browsers that go to one landing page (maybe iPhone formatted), and another ad that’s just shown to people on a computer that goes to your regular webpage.

If you have an iPhone formatted site, you might want to duplicate your campaigns and switch the landing pages for the iPhone vs computer searchers (i.e. a iPhone landing page campaign and then your typical desktop/laptop computer campaign).

For your existing campaigns, your campaigns are automatically opted into showing to iPhones and full internet browser devices. You can easily change where your ad is shown in your campaign settings.

This change does not affect mobile ads. If you have created a specific mobile ad; it will still be displayed to mobile devices as usual regardless of your campaign settings. You can also preview mobile ads with Google’s mobile preview tool.

Google AdWords now showing your ads on Mobile devices – Do you want your ad there? is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Similar to the search preview page, Google launched an ad preview page for mobile (http://www.google.com/m/adpreview).

The really nice part is the on screen segmentation controls. It’s very easy to switch views depending on:

• Country & Carrier
• Spoken language
• Markup language
• Search type

This is a nice tool to be able to see a mobile result to understand what the consumer sees and the advertising competition.

Google Launches Ad Preview for Mobile is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Can I track mobile ad conversions?

Conversion tracking is available for both the PC- or mobile-version of your website.

Learn more about setting up conversion tracking for your mobile website.

Source: AdWords help files

Google mobile ads now support conversion tracking is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Google’s rendering is much worse than my site’s mobile view. In these instances, Google needs to let me (or any mobile site owner) opt out of having their content displayed in a way that was unapproved by the site owner.

Here’s a look at Google’s rendering of this website’s home page:

Here’s the version a user would see if Google didn’t change it:

Which looks better for a user?

I’d have to vote for my view.

I’m using a low tech wordpress plug-in (with some modifications) that does a browser detect (which includes phone types) to determine to serve the HTML or Mobile page. Hence, I don’t make users remember a mobile versus a PC URL (and they shouldn’t have to).

Serving mobile pages should be the same as doing a browser detect for flash (and speed) and then serving a flash or HTML version of a page.

Google is crawling the web looking for mobile pages. While that may be step one in building a mobile search product, step two is understanding what sites have mobile pages and letting users see the best page.

Mobile growth will be dependent on:

• data quality
• search experience
• website adoption

In this instance, all three exist. Google needs to let site owners have control of their content so that users can have good mobile experiences.

View your site through mobile eyes:

To see what your site looks like to Google searchers, visit Google’s mobile proxy.

To see what your site looks like on a smart phone you can download Windows 2003 Pocket PC Emulator or Windows 2003 SE Smartphone Emulator.

Google Showing Incorrect Versions of Mobile Pages is a post from: Certified Knowledge

When someone is out in the community, and they take the time to look up a number or directions on a mobile phone – that individual is ready for action.

Mobile advertising is still fairly new (from a technology standpoint), and the inventory is still limited.

However, the possibilities are extreme.

Molecular recently did a study that has some very interesting findings:

The Molecular research survey shows the following:

Americans are ready for mobile surfing, but web sites aren’t – one out of four American adults (26 percent) say they would use their mobile phone or handheld device to access the Web if mobile web pages were easier to navigate. For Americans between the ages of 18 and 44, the likelihood they would use their mobile phone or handheld device to access the Web is even higher: 32 percent or one out of three.

Americans are ready to do financial transactions over the mobile Web, but brands don’t make it easy – More than one in four Americans with a mobile phone (28 percent) say that they’d like to use their phone or handheld device for purchases and financial transactions, but the companies with whom they do business make it difficult to do so via these devices.

The PC still feels safer – 58 percent of Americans disagree that data sent over a mobile phone or handheld device is as safe as data sent from their personal computer.

The biggest questions for most advertisers has been:

• Where do I find the inventory?
• How do I make a mobile website?

I love testing. I love experimenting. I’d enjoy making this blog also mobile.

Does anyone have recommendations for software to make a website mobile?

Is there a wordpress plugin that makes mobile compliant sections of a blog?

Mobile Users Are Ready – The Web Isn't is a post from: Certified Knowledge