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Beginners Guide To Creating Mobile AdWords Campaigns

June 23, 2009

My latest Search Engine Land column is out entitled: Beginners Guide To Creating Mobile AdWords Campaigns.

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.

AdWords Mobile Pages Officially Close

May 7, 2009

I just received this email from Google:

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 Retiring Google Mobile Business Pages – Quick Mobile Site Creation Guide

February 17, 2009

Search Engine Land recently reported that Google was removing their mobile business pages. These were pages where you could enter some business information and then drive users from your mobile ads to these pages instead of to your website.

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.

Google AdWords now showing your ads on Mobile devices – Do you want your ad there?

December 9, 2008

Google recently added a new way in which your ads can be displayed – on Mobile devices with full internet browsers (such as the iPhone or G1).

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 Launches Ad Preview for Mobile

May 16, 2007

Every wonder what your AdWords mobile ad looks like on a mobile phone? How about on a different carrier? Or in a different country?

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.

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