The best Christmas present you can put in your advertising campaign’s stocking this year is a paid search campaign specifically optimized for Smartphone devices.
Internet users and potential customers are going to be locked onto to the Smartphone device from now until 2013. Smart advertisers will start optimizing their Smartphone campaigns today.
Greg Sterling, online marketing expert, explains via the Search Engine Land website how Google anticipates a huge surge in the use of Smartphone devices during the holiday season this year. It is advisable that all online advertisers begin preparing for this shift in online user activity in order to maximize the potential for sales and other kinds of conversions between now and the end of the year.
How do you prepare your campaigns for the increase in Smartphone use during the holidays?
As with any shift in online consumer behavior, it is best to plan ahead and have a strategy in mind.
To have an effective strategy in place in this instance, all advertisers need to consider how consumer behavior will be different. In particular, what differences can be found between the PC user and the Smartphone user?
Advice offered by Sterling on Search Engine Land
Sterling suggests implementing the following on your Smartphone advertisements during the holiday season:
- Create new advertisements with new advertisement copy specifically for Smartphone users during the holiday period.
- On the busiest shopping days of the holiday season, increase your budget to make sure that your advertisements are going to last throughout the entire day.
- Adjust your campaign settings so that your advertisements are shown throughout the entire day and not just at a specific time, as research predicts that Internet users will be online shopping throughout the entire day – you need to be able to catch their eyes at all hours.
- Ensure that your campaign is segmented to record data by device. This will help you to better analyze consumer behavior throughout the holiday period and make adjustments to your campaign as and when necessary.
- Integrate holiday-related keywords into your campaign.
Further ideas for successful Smartphone advertising during the holidays
Sterling’s ideas provide a great base from which to begin optimizing for the Smartphone holiday rush, but there are a number of other important things that all advertisers can be doing to really take full advantage of intense Smartphone consumer activity this holiday season.
For example:
- Invest in link extension advertisements to help consumers get to the exact page they want to get to in as few steps as possible. The Smartphone consumer during the holidays is going to be less interested in research and more interested in converting. Help them to buy your products or services quicker and this will drive conversions.
- Invest in product advertisements so that images of your products can be seen in pop-up image boxes directly from the Google SERP. Image works better than text when encouraging people to buy, so invest more money and time in working with images of your products at all stages of the conversion funnel.
- Make sure the consumer has the option to call your store, send an email, find store location details and connect with your social networking pages at every single stage possible (on every landing page) of your Smartphone campaign. Be super helpful this holiday season, because people are going to be online with cash in hand that they want to spend. Make it easy for them to spend it.
Webrageous is an expert in pay per click management and a specialist in the area of pay per click consulting. All pay per click optimization inquiries are welcome.
