By James Burchill
Mobile marketing is a fast-growing, quickly-changing arena with a lot of promise to become of the largest advertising forums on the planet. Mobile search marketing is one of the leading subsets of this industry. Google introduced ‘Click-to-Call’ last year as part of its mobile search platform, allowing businesses to list phone numbers with their paid search results (AdWords ads).
Since its introduction, Click-to-Call has become hugely popular with ‘millions of calls every month’ initiated by the program, according to Google. These have become one of the largest of the targeted mobile campaign genres, and it’s paying off.
The ads and where they are used most often to place calls follows smart phone adoption. Currently, this means that most of the Click-to-Call action is happening in the major cities of the U.S., throughout Europe, and in Japan.
How Click-to-Call Ads Work
The ads are served whenever a phone user accesses the Internet and does a search through Google. Paid results are, as with PC-based searches, tied in with the search subject of the user. If the results include paid advertisements from mobile advertisers, then a Click-to-Call number will also be included. Users can click the number to call the business immediately.
When the user has GPS enabled, the search can get even more precise, showing the closest business to them with a Click-to-Call number.
Advertisers get themselves listed as a Click-to-Call result by participating in Google’s AdWords phone extensions program. Optionally, the business can also include a location extension to make themselves even more visible to more locally-targeted searchers.
These ‘hyper-local’ ads can often be the most productive for an advertiser, according to Google.
Since mobile users are statistically more prone to take immediate action when searching for something, advertising on this medium has become very productive. Hit-for-hit, mobile ads can consistently show a two or three times better click-through (or user action) rate than their desktop counterparts.
How Does It Pay Off?
One company says they’re seeing 200% increase in search results on their mobile platform as compared to their standard Google ads for desktops (comparing hit-for-hit). This means that for every hit they receive via mobile or desktop, they see a 200% higher click-through for mobile than they are seeing for desktops.
This is a national company. Local advertisers are seeing even greater results. A small, local shop says that their online search marketing has shown almost no measurable result in increased business. They started using mobile advertising through Google and have seen a 9-12% higher first-time-customer walk-in rate.
No matter how you look at it, mobile advertising is becoming the ‘next big thing’ in marketing. For businesses both local and national (or even international), it’s going to be one of the biggest marketing arenas out there. This will become even more true as smart phones continue their phenomenal growth rate and proliferation.
AMES BURCHILL shows individuals and companies how to profit from the innovative use of Internet technologies, strategic content and social media marketing. You can find out more at James’ website and you can subscribe to his J-List and get over 40 articles, reports and advice on Internet Marketing today.
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