Mobile advertising has created an entirely new opportunity for businesses to drive phone calls to sales teams and call centers, generating a new method for our advertisers to receive qualified incoming leads. In fact, since we introduced the click-to-call feature to advertisers over a year ago, we’ve had more than half a million customers  globally run campaigns with phone extensions.

Two of the most common ways to get mobile customers to call you are either by listing your phone number on a click-to-call ad, or adding your phone number onto your website. It’s easy to measure calls from a click-to-call ad from your Campaign reports, but it can be more challenging  to track the calls made by consumers clicking on the phone number on your website.  

Today, we are introducing a new conversion tracking metric to help advertisers and agencies do just that: all AdWords accounts will now have the ability to report calls placed from mobile pages.

A Direct TV landing page featuring prominent ‘call’ buttons from beta partner Red Ventures

You’ll now be able to attribute clicks on your phone number or ‘call’ button back to the AdWords campaign, ad group, ad or keyword that brought a customer in. As this is a new tracking metric, there won’t be new charges or changes to CPCs. We hope that this new metric will give advertisers and agencies new, richer information on the value and returns from their mobile advertising.  

Red Ventures, a customer acquisition company in Charlotte, NC, was a beta partner for this new conversion metric. In addition to their own proprietary in-house tracking platform, they used this new metric to track the use of click-to-call numbers on their mobile websites for a variety of partners.  John Sutton, VP of Online Marketing at Red Ventures, said, “Now, every advertiser can get full insight into calls generated from their AdWords spend on mobile devices, directly inside the AdWords interface and at a very granular level.” Moreover, John sees this as a new added benefit to AdWords advertisers who “don’t have the capability required to produce unique keyword or ad level phone numbers on their mobile websites.”

This new metric enables all advertisers to leverage existing AdWords tools to now optimize for calls.  According to John Sutton at Red Ventures, this “opens the doors to participation in AdWords features that rely on conversion metrics like Enhanced CPC and Target CPA bidding.” You can start using this new metric by installing a snippet of code on your landing pages. Upon doing so, you can set ‘calls’ as a conversion metric to track on your landing page. Next, you can pair calls focused campaigns with tools like Conversion Optimizer, then bid by setting a target CPA for calls, and ultimately automate ad serving to optimize for calls.

If driving calls is an important part of your mobile advertising strategy, and you’ve placed a phone number or ‘Call now!’ button on your site, begin measuring these calls now using this new conversion type. Moreover, in doing so you’ll be able to leverage a rich set of existing AdWords tools available to you to optimize performance. For more information on how to set this up, please see our Help Center article.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Product Manager, Mobile Ads

Meliá Hotels International is one of the largest hotel companies in the world with more than 350 hotels (including brands such as Gran Meliá, Meliá, Sol and Paradisus) and is actively positioning itself to seize the opportunity in the mobile market. Daniel Garcia Langa, Online Sales & Marketing Director, believes that the mobile platform will eventually get a lot bigger than the desktop Internet is now. Therefore they launched a website optimized for mobile devices, becoming the first Spanish hotel chain to offer this service.

Meliá Hotels International mobile site

After launch of their site, they have observed that it is typically business travelers reserving hotel rooms from mobile devices. This customer segment looks for city-based hotels and makes reservations very last-minute. These hotel bookings currently account for 70 % of reservations on mobile corresponding to 60 % of revenue.

To ensure that users found their mobile site, Meliá Hotels International already from the beginning implemented AdWords campaigns specifically targeting mobile devices. In August alone, AdWords drove 27 % of their mobile traffic. They have in fact seen traffic from mobile devices increase by six in comparison to 2010 and the number of transactions have multiplied by twelve.

Meliá Hotels International predicts that in the mid-term the use of tablet devices will result in a significant rise in holiday hotel reservations. Due to the large screen-size and interactive features it becomes much easier for customers to make decisions when booking their holidays.

For more details on this case study, you can download the full version in English or Spanish.

Posted by Frank Albert Coates, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile ads

Good data on the smartphone user is hard to come by. Good data that enables companies to make data driven decisions on how to engage with consumers on their smartphone is even harder to come by.

Today we are launching a new resource to address that need. Our Mobile Planet www.ourmobileplanet.com is a new web site featuring an interactive tool that anyone can use to create custom charts that will deepen their understanding of the mobile consumer and support data driven decisions on their mobile strategy.

The site gives anyone access the full set of data from the “Global Mobile Research: The Smartphone User & The Mobile Marketer” we conducted earlier this year (March & July 2011) with Ipsos and in collaboration with the Mobile Marketing Association.

Example of a presentation ready chart on ourmobileplanet.com

Need to know the smartphone penetration in Singapore? It’s 62%. Trying to figure out if more consumers in France or Germany have made purchases via their smartphone? It’s France. Want to know if consumers in the UK visit a store after doing a local search on their smartphone? 41% of them do.

Now anyone - marketer, app developer, tech geek, big or small - can answer these questions and many more by drawing on one of the the most extensive, far reaching standardized surveys on smartphone user behavior ever conducted. Not to mention, this is the first time a study this extensive has been made available for free. 

We commissioned this survey and have made the data available for free because we believe the shift to mobile is so fundamental that we need to do everything we can to help businesses adapt immediately.

Posted by:
Nicole Leverich
Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

At IAB MiXX in New York, I got to demo some of the amazing things that are possible with HTML5 mobile rich media creative, like our recent Uncover Your World campaign.

Today, we’re making HTML5 banners available to all advertisers and agencies, providing marketers with a richer canvas on which to create beautiful ad experiences on mobile.  In addition to animations, HTML5 banners enable marketers use mobile device capabilities like tilt and shake to enrich their creatives.  These banners will run on all our ad unit sizes for both tablets and smartphones in iOS and Android mobile apps in the AdMob network, and will offer new opportunities for marketers to drive engagement and improved performance on mobile.

What’s possible with HTML5 banners? Inspired by IAB MiXX’s host city, New York, we created a sample ad to show some of the things marketers will be able to do with this new format.  In the ad, the New York skyline appears layer by layer, and then, as the user tilts the tablet, the skyline moves, creating the illusion that the user is peering around the buildings. Click here from your tablet to see the ad.



Mobile display advertising is skyrocketing and we’re dedicated to fostering this ecosystem and helping it continue to grow.  In addition to new creative tools like HTML5 banners, we’re also working hard to make mobile display ads more efficient.  Today, beta advertisers can serve rich media ads from Doubleclick into AdMob apps, a feature that has seen exciting initial results. We are also working closely with the IAB to create the industry's first standards for mobile rich media ads, which will make easier to run rich media ads across multiple ad networks.

We look forward to seeing what all those creative minds come up with!

Posted by: Clay Bavor, Product Management Director, Mobile Ads

How does a 168-year old publication stay young? Continuous innovation.

The weekly newspaper was founded in 1843 by an enterprising Scotsman, the British publication has, right from the start, steadily served up business and political news, analysis, and opinion to both U.K. and U.S. readers.

The publication has embraced the digital zeitgeist with an archival-based website and web-only content that includes blogs, debates, and audio/video programs. It has also made editions available on Android, iPhone, and iPad. Users can download the apps for free access to the editor’s weekly selection of six must-read articles. Full access is available by subscription.

Mobilizing an app strategy

Determined to further broaden its readership and accessibility, The Economist turned to mobile  marketing strategies in order to tap into the burgeoning base of young, on-the-go professionals. Working with ad agency Neo@Ogilvy, the publication chose mobile advertising network Google AdMob to target a desired demographic: 25-to-35 year-olds exhibiting intellectual curiosity, thirst for current news, and a predilection for high-tech content delivery. The initial markets targeted were Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan.

Phase I of The Economist campaign took place over 4.5 months from November 19, 2010 to March 31, 2011. Banner and text ads ran on AdMob’s network and targeted users of both Apple iPhone and iPad.




Reaching new market audiences

The campaign significantly raised awareness of The Economist among mobile consumers both within the overall group and amongst target consumers. Additionally, the campaign was significantly well received amongst those interested in news and current affairs where the campaign had a directional impact on awareness, brand favorability and purchase intention.

In particular, the iPad audience had an increase in intent to purchase a single issue/subscribe to The Economist after exposure, indicating that the campaign was able to positively change perceptions among this group.

Neo@Ogilvy also conducted a corollary study of 105 mobile-device users fitting the targeted 25-35 demographic. Of the group sampled, 47.1% of those exposed to the mobile ads indicated a willingness to purchase a subscription to The Economist on the iPad as opposed to only 32.7% of the control group not exposed to the ads. This difference in intent to purchase exceeded the 80th percentile confidence level, indicating a positive impact on branding, according to BrandMetrics.

Overall, the campaign was effective in reaching new audiences that differ in demographics and media consumption than the traditional core reader of The Economist. By demonstrating directional improvements in brand awareness, brand favourability and purchase intention, the campaign results show that advertising on the mobile web offers a new opportunity for The Economist, including targeting the fast-growing base of Android users in the near future. By enabling discovery, branding, and monetization on the mobile web, AdMob has become a critical media platform for a publication with a venerable past and a bright future.

Posted by: Christian Cadeo, Head of Mobile, Southeast Asia
 

Rich Media Display Ads Across Screens = Better Together
We partnered with Nielsen to measure the incremental impact of multi-screen advertising. In a study conducted at CBS’s Television City media lab run by Nielsen, study participants were asked to view related content across TV, PCs, smartphones and tablets. A 15-second video ad promoting Volvo's S60 sedan was shown to different groups of participants, with some people seeing no ads, and others seeing the ad on a different combinations of screens controlling for frequency.

The results clearly demonstrated the impact that multi-screen advertising has on branding. In the group that was exposed to TV ads alone, 50% of people correctly attributed the ad to Volvo. For groups that saw the ad across all screens -- TV, PC, smartphone and tablet -- the brand recall jumps dramatically to 74%.


Similarly, only 22% of the group that was exposed to just the TV ad correctly recalled that the ad was for a 4-door sedan versus 39% of the group that saw the ad across all screens.

 

We share this ad effectiveness research on the heels of our recently released internal data on multi-screen usage patterns revealing how users select the type of screen they are interacting with at different points in their day (New! Search data reveal that when the sun goes down, the tablets come out).  The multi-screen opportunity is looming for advertisers so we wanted to share these new insights and showcase examples of successful integrated digital display campaigns.

Smart advertisers are already running integrated digital campaigns.
We’ve worked with hundreds of advertisers who have translated their desktop search and display goals to mobile and now to tablets.  One example we’ve shared previously is the Animal Planet case study, and today we want to share a new example: adidas.  adidas, in partnership with Carat, worked with Google to extend their video brand message to digital. With Google’s unique cross-channel capabilities, adidas was able to extend its video creative across all digital platforms, adapting them for engagement across PCs, smartphones and tablets.

Posted by:  Johanna Werther & Ben Chung, Google Mobile Ads Marketing

Last week, we presented a webinar,“Going Mobile: From Why to How?” on the five fundamental components to a mobile advertising strategy to help you get started. Google Product Marketing Manager, Sonja Lee and Mobile Specialist, Angela Sherman presented key statistics surrounding the current state of the mobile landscape, particularly looking ahead into the holiday season, and presented a deep dive on the five things that every mobile advertiser should do:

1. Mobilizing your web presence
2. Set up separate mobile-only campaigns
3. Think Local with Mobile
4. Utilize mobile-unique ad formats
5. Track and optimize your mobile performance

To learn more, download the Mobile Site Optimization webinar slides or watch the recording of the event on the Google Mobile Ads YouTube Channel or below.





Posted by: Sonja Lee, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads