How To: Improve Your Search Marketing Campaign for Mobile Devices

As the Search Engine Marketer (SEM) your job can be a tough one. How do you best optimize an SEM campaign in order to get the best return on investment (ROI) for every cost per click (CPC) that you’re paying for with your ads? With the introduction of mobile devices  to the mix, you’ve got yourself a whole new world to plan for when it comes to creating a new campaign. With over 70 million tablets and over half of mobile phones in the US being smartphones, that is a huge sector to consider. Here are some tips to help you out.

• Analyze trends in mobile traffic – Mobile traffic can vary depending on the business you’re dealing with. Retail and restaurants have a higher mobile device traffic rate than business to business or financial services for example. Analyze the mobile traffic for your particular business and then decide if you need a paid search strategy that focuses on mobile devices.
• Build campaigns specifically for mobile – You have an already established campaign for desktop use but now you’ve discovered that you need to create a campaign for mobile devices as well. The best thing to do is to build new separate campaigns for tablets and smartphones. The CPCs and conversion rates are different by device so ads with the same keyword must be created differently by device.
• Expand upon brand keywords – Building a campaign for mobile devices using your brand keywords just to have some form of presence can result in a poor ROI. If you feel you have an abundant amount of mobile traffic, try a non-branded keyword, mobile-targeted specific campaign.
• Target Specifics – ROI varies by device, so this means that it’s a good idea to try targeting specific OS’ and devices. Once again, this depends on the amount of mobile traffic you get and if it’s worth it to try it. If the mobile traffic is a small amount then you’ll end up splitting your campaign into small fractions with no noticeable ROI on any of them.
• Embrace the mobile friendly site – By this point you’d think that a mobile friendly website would be the norm among marketers, but it isn’t. With the explosion of the mobile market over the past year though, not having a mobile specific site can hurt your business as some users are more likely to go to a site that is friendly to their mobile devices.

Using these tips you can build a mobile specific SEM campaign with a new mobile site to anchor that campaign. This can help you generate a successful paid-search strategy that reaches your target audience and helps you capitalize on the new mobile world we now live in.