Mobile Search 2012

While the bulk of Asia is debating over to develop a mobile app or a mobile website; search queries on the mobile continue to rise. As per Google estimates, the search volume is growing over 400 percent each year and states that 79 percent of the smartphone owners use it to compare prices, research products or services, and more.

In Asia, we see similar trends across most of the markets. However, there is still a difference in the way a user will search on a desktop versus mobile versus a tablet device.

So as a marketer should you leverage the situation or wait for the true year of mobile? The simple answer is – start now!

Start by evaluating the volume of traffic that is originating from different devices/platforms on your website. Within Google Analytics you can do this rather instantly.

Identify the opportunity for your mobile market. This can be done by measuring the number of search queries your current keywords generate from mobile devices on a monthly basis. The “Advanced Options and Filters” within the Google Keyword tool allows you to do this.

Next will be to identify how you will want to set up a mobile campaign. Users are usually on the go when using mobile devices, particularly smartphone subscribers. This means the searches they conduct are much different or shorter than what they do on a desktop. For example, someone searches for ‘camera review’ on the desktop might search for ”camera shop nearby” on their smart phone. And, platforms such as AdWords allow for advance mobile ad capability such as – coupon download, download app, start an app, click-to-call or even click-to-download (some features may not be available in some South East Asia markets).

The bidding strategy also changes for the mobile platform, Google searches on mobile devices return only five ads, two of which appear above the organic results. As a result, you’ll want to consider bidding important keywords to position one or two. Your campaigns won’t be as vast as their desktop counter parts.

Do not build a million keyword mobile campaigns!

At this point, with mobile on the rise it shouldn’t be a question of whether or not to develop a mobile strategy but how much effort and resources to devote to your mobile campaigns. This will not only give you the added advantage to learn the mobile world well before someone else does; it also prepares you better in answering the question how best does your brand want to use mobile as a platform.