By Brendan Almack on 20 Nov 2015
Between July and August 2015, Google slipped a change into its mobile search results, somewhat under the radar. Where there had previously been two paid listings at the top of the mobile SERPs, this was increased to three. This change had a significant impact on many AdWords accounts. Metrics affected included click-through-rate (CTR), traffic from mobile, overall spend on mobile and ultimately conversion rate.
Here, Brendan discusses how PPC marketers can respond to this disruption in their AdWords accounts.
Video Transcript:
Hi everyone, I’m Brendan, and today I’m going to talk to you about mobile ads, in particular I’m going to talk about the paid search results on mobile devices.
Change in the Mobile SERPs
So this is typically what we’re used to seeing: two paid search results on a mobile device. But at some stage between July and August of 2015, this all changed, and now what we’re actually seeing are three paid search results on a mobile device. And this is really interesting because usually Google are very transparent about telling us about any kind of updates of this nature, but this one went under the radar – Google didn’t announce it. Now I’ll leave it up to you to decide why Google mightn’t have announced something like this, but the way we actually noticed it was through our campaign performance and one of the things we could see is that mobile ad click through rate (CTR) went up significantly.
So here I’m looking at a number of client accounts over time and I’m looking at the mobile ad CTR and you can see sure enough sometime between July and August, mobile ad CTR goes up, and in some cases it actually doubled. So that means we get an increase in CTR, when we get an increase in CTR what we typically get then is more mobile traffic. When we get more mobile traffic, what actually is happening is that we’re spending proportionally more on mobile. And again we could see this within client accounts. So I’m looking at a client here for example who is from the travel industry. They don’t get a huge amount of traffic from mobile, but you can see again sometime between July and August the percentage of mobile clicks they are getting goes up and the percentage of their spend on mobile goes up.
How it Disrupts Your AdWords Account KPIs
So what? Why is this important?
Well, if you are a marketer or you’re a brand and you’re working to a KPI (key performance indicator) such as cost per conversion or cost per acquisition, that KPI is intrinsically linked to conversion rate. And we all know, that mobile conversion rate tends to be lower than desktop conversion rate. Now what’s happening in your account is you’re getting proportionally more mobile traffic, which means your conversion rate or your account conversion rate could be reduced and that could make it more difficult for you to hit your KPI on an on-going basis.
How Paid Search Marketers Can Respond
So what does this actually mean, as a paid search marketer what should you do?
Well the first thing to do is to understand that if you’re getting a lot of mobile traffic, your mobile traffic could be dictating your overall account performance. We have some clients now that get more than 50 per cent of their traffic from mobile devices, so that means mobile is dictating account performance. As a paid search marketer it means that your optimisation strategy really needs to start with mobile. And that’s a lot easier said than done, because anyone who knows AdWords, and you guys will know AdWords, it’s actually set up to bid on desktop, and then you adjust for mobile. It’s not necessarily set up to allow you to bid on mobile first. Thirdly, it means that we need to understand mobile conversion rate a lot better - because as I said earlier, when you look at mobile conversion rate in isolation it doesn’t tell the full story, and we know that mobile conversion rate in isolation can be low. What we’re not seeing though, is the amount of people who are researching something on their mobile device, on a commute home for example, and then completing their purchase on a desktop when they get home. That’s called cross device tracking. And that’s very difficult for us to see or that journey is difficult for us to see using a pixel, or using sessions. So we need to understand how mobile conversion rate contributes to the overall website conversion rate. And lastly, maybe it means the end of mobile SEO. Okay, it definitely doesn’t mean the end of mobile SEO, but it does mean that the opportunity or the space available within the organic results is getting smaller. Because that one additional ad is pushing those organic results further down below the fold.
