Why you can’t afford to ignore mobile ads

Mobile browsing is increasingly dominating the search market, with mobile usage now greater than desktop or laptop. So it isn’t surprising that Google has been tweaking things in order to optimise such a lucrative platform, making mobile ads much more profitable.

Recent reports have suggested that Google has updated the format of its mobile search listings. Here’s why you should start investing in mobile ads

Up until now, mobile users were shown two paid ads (sometimes with a product listing carousel, too) at the top of the screen when they typed in a search query. Since mobile screens are pretty small, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that securing a top-two place is important for advertisers. After all, most users can’t be bothered to scroll down too far and are more likely to click on the ads and search results at the top of the page on their mobile device.

It is a highly competitive market if you want to achieve a first-place listing on a mobile device, but with three places now available, paid ads are already seeing a significant boost in impressions and clicks

A surge in paid impressions on mobile devices

The changes first started appearing in June/July, and since then advertisers have noticed a big increase. There has been no increase in tablet or desktop devices, so it is clearly a change to mobile device format only.

Google prefers paid mobile ads

All the data now suggests that Google is moving away from its organic search query model and changing the format to a paid search model. With an increase in the number of paid ads on small mobile screens, organic search results are being pushed further down the page. So whilst organic visit growth could potentially decline, paid visit growth is likely to continue increasing. Making pay per click even more essential to a digital marketing strategy.

How does this affect your businesses?

AdWords is a key part of many business marketing campaigns, and whether you have excellent organic results or not, with the recent changes to Google’s mobile format, now is not a good time to decrease your AdWords budget. Mobile bidding in AdWords is becoming increasingly competitive with companies vying for the most lucrative top places. Digital marketing agencies like Converted are advising that you ensure you factor in mobile paid search into your strategy.

Businesses are likely to continue to see a greater share of traffic via paid ads on mobile devices so it is wise to factor into your budget mobile searches for the foreseeable future.