#SMX Liveblog: Capturing the Mobile Paid Lead #23C

Moderator Greg Sterling drops a kernel of new info: if consumers have a negative map experience they’ll make that negative association with the brand. It’s important to make sure your brand’s data is right on maps and mobile.

Winning Mobile

Speaker: Ben Braverman, Head of Growth at URX, @braveben

His presentation centers on capitalizing on the supercomputer in your customer’s pocket. In January, the time U.S. consumers spent in apps officially eclipsed the time spent on the web otherwise. His company drives revenue after the install.

First, get an app.

• Build it
• Buy it
• In-app conversion rate > mobile web
• US user time spent in app = 4x time in mobile web
• Install strategy

Deeplinks

• URLs take you to specific pages on a site, deeplinks do the same for apps
• Deeplinks are a big part of the reason that apps are able to take off — a good user experience
• If your app is not deeplinked, Google won’t index your app by the end of the year
• Home-brew or Open Source frameworks like Turnpike
• Google App Indexing
• Deeplinks can degrade gracefully
• Social media, email marketing, paid marketing

Discovery: A big issue for app developers is getting your app discovered. How users find apps (from most popular way on): App Store search, friends and family, third party sites

App Store SEO:

• Experiment with different app categories
• Deeplink your app
• App title: multi-word name, include keywords
• Keyword field (look at the top apps’ keyword field)

Paid user acquisition:
In the early days, buying an app install was unheard of. Now you can price out an app install on hundreds of networks. 2 years ago, being an ad network was prestigious. Now ad networks are commodities that are as valuable as their publisher network. Programatic buying, RTB and exchanges allow you to adjust your bidding strategy. Facebook is the largest mobile app ad network and he expects a Facebook Mobile FBX will be coming soon.

Programatic Buying:

• Mobile advertising at scale
• Set goals in the most relevant metric (CPI/CPA/CPC/CPM)

How your installs become customers:

• An installed user isn’t a customer, they’re an opportunity
• Average user has 80 apps
• 60%+ opened between 1-10 times
• Push notifications, paid engagement
• Personalized marketing
• Mobile-centric app value

He says track everything unless terms of service require you to delete it. There’s some controversy over device ID in the iOS App Store that you’ll want to look into.

Your Mobile Action Plan in 10 Steps

Speaker: Joseph Kerschbaum @joekerschbaum, 3Q Digital account director

He’ll be zooming in on Google AdWords (apologizing to Bing and saying he had to focus in). The steps get harder as he goes through this presentation.

Mobile Ads – Do Them Now

• Mobile-optimized text ads and extensions will be given preference on mobile devices.
• He recommends 2 mobile ads and 2 desktop ads.
• Tip: Avoid truncation. Mobile ads should be shorter. Aim under 60 characters.
• The same applies to Sitelinks. You have to tell Google (go in your Ad Extensions) and set mobile optimized Sitelinks.
• Tip: Mobile optimized sitelinks are shorter. Aim for 15-17 characters in links.

Mobile Devices Are Actually Phones

• Set up call extensions under Ad Extensions.
• Charged the same as for a standard click on the ad.
• Clickable on devices that allow a user to click and call.
• Utilized Google call-forwarding for tracking.
• If they last longer than 60 seconds Google registers this as a conversion and that can be reported by Google.

Get Purposeful with Mobile Bid Ads
Determine a mobile bidding strategy

Keep in mind there are modifiers modifying each other all over the place. AdWords is becoming a much more complicated machine

There are so many things influencing each ad. So:

Active Bid Adjustments
Review all bid modifiers. Go under Settings and look for “Active bid adj.” to add. Now you can see location, ad schedule and device. And you can see all bid modifiers listed for that ad and a bid adjustment range.

Improve Mobile & GDN – Don’t Cross the Streams

• Mobile + Display = Sadness
• In mobile, a consumer’s in a snack mode. For display, consumers are blocking you out. He’s found GDN campaigns on mobile perform terribly.
• Instead, craft your structure. Here’s how they do it:

• Exclude mobile devices from GDN

Tablets Are Mobile Devices

• GDN: Better than mobile isn’t good
• Tablets bring down their GDN campaigns overall.
• What you can do is go under Display network, go to targeting, go to category options and remove entire categories. You can also remove all apps (adsenseformobileapps.com).

All Your Effort = Fail?

• Conversion Optimizer is great but it’s a bit of a mystery.
• Use accelerated ad delivery with Conversion Optimizer. He thinks bid adjustments clicked in.
• Remember, it’s not just responsive design, it’s responsive experience. People on mobile are on the go, browsing, not ready for a long-term relationship. Optimize for design and content. You want to make sure visitors know what to do on the mobile site. Optimize your web experience for design AND user intent.

Monitor mobile lead quality closely. Not all leads are equal. You need to be able to separate out conversions by device. This can be difficult to implement, but not having this data is crucial. You don’t want a single bucket of all conversions.

Start thinking about cross-device behavior. People are addicted to screens. What to know now:

People start on a phone and end on a larger device. The 10 steps he shared. can be used to support this behavior.

bit.ly/Mobile-Action-Plan includes a spreadsheet for you to track your implementation of these 10 steps.

Mobile Leads and Click-To-Call

Speaker: John Busby @JohnMBusby, SVP Marchex

M-commerce is important. Mobile influenced sales is much bigger than m-commerce. Look at “The Roll of Click to Call on the Path to Purchase” — a paper by Google. Besides Google, consumers search on local and vertical directories. Vertical aggregators are another source of mobile clicks. They buy traffic to harness consumer intent and the experience is a lead form or phone call. Voice search is also an important channel driving mobile leads, despite this not being monetized yet.

What brands and agencies should do about click-to-call:
1. Have a tracking phone number. This isn’t the call extension Google gives you from call extensions — it’s everywhere you put your phone number.
2. Have an IVR (or phone menu). This is important because people make a lot of accidental calls and you want to avoid burdening your call centers with that plus spammers and telemarketers. An IVR also qualifies intent of the caller and provides real-time reporting for optimization.
3. Measure the effectiveness of your mobile landing page.
Simple changes could mean more ROI.

4. Consider “rescuing” calls. It’s unlikely a consumer will leave a voice mail. Work with a call solution to collect lead info and then email that to the business.
5. Measure intent. If you know why consumers are calling you can adjust and improve your ad copy.

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.