Google Mobile Workshop

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend a Google Mobile Workshop and they confirmed what everyone has been saying
“2011 is the year for mobile”

Finlay from Google talked at New Year Search Club in January this year where he mentioned mobile would really take off and it definitely has.

(Image from www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/mobile-search-tips-and-best-practices-8276/)

Mobile search queries have increased considerably from last year. Here are a few interesting stats:

Travel queries on mobile have risen from
4% (2010) to 11% (2011)

Retail queries
4% (2010) to 13% (2011)

Tech queries
5% (2010) to 10% (2011)

Entertainment
7% (2010) to 18% (2011)

Do you use your mobile while out shopping? Apparently 45 % of us do and 15% use it to compare prices.
The study carried out by Google, also found that with mobile, people always have them with them and are searching while at home and on the go. 74% of people use them at the same time as consuming other media.

Read more »

Feel the Mobile Love

The other week, I went to a Google mobile event. – Google loves mobile

I knew mobile was big, but after this event, I knew it was no longer the future, it was happening now. Those that are not using a mobile strategy should be seriously thinking of starting one today.

It may seem daunting, but mobile internet is the same position that the internet was 10 years ago and look how big that has grown. A user should have the same experience on the mobile and on the web. It is interesting to see how much internet on desktops has grown. Check out on the bbc’s website to visually see the growth of the internet.

There are 4.6 billion mobile phones world wide, more than 1,000 customers sign up every minute. You can no longer ignore mobile.

So where do you start?
If you are working agency side, you should start to introduce mobile marketing to your clients. The first step is assessing their website, which should be visible on a regular handset. I do not just mean smart phones such as the iPhone or Android but symbian phones as well such as the Nokia 6303. There are a lot of retail, finance and travel companies that are planning mobile at the moment. If you do not have a site that can be seen on a mobile phone, make sure there is at least a landing page that can be built in line with your advertising campaigns.

To app or not to app?
A lot of people when they want to get into mobile think they should build an app. There are over 50 million iphone and iphone touches and more than 3billion downloads for these apps. I wrote about apps in another post mobile app or mobile site and when I was at the event, Carl Uminski from Somo mentioned that there was a life cycle of apps. If it gets featured in the App store (which is luck) then it can get to top 25 of the Apple app store. This equates to 500 downloads a day. If the app is promoted to the top 10, then it can get 1000 downloads a day. However, there is a sudden decline.

He said people should think ahead of time and have ad campaigns to promote it. There is a lot of competition, 130,000 other apps people can choose from. You need to have a mobile advertising strategy before you build.
Somo have witnessed conversion to download range from 4% to 12%
Advertising click through rates range form 1% to 4.8%
Cost per download can range from 80p to 1.50 for free applications

Mobile search
Another interesting point raised at the event was that people on mobile phones who access the internet have different needs, they are more hunters than researchers. They are out and about and use their phone to look for something specific. Therefore there needs to be different ad copy for the paid adverts. Your digital agency should be able to build creative for you.

2010 is the year for mobile search and I challenge you to start using it with your clients or with your agency.

Photo is from flickr

Agencies offering a mobile strategy

There are many agencies that are already offering comprehensive mobile strategy.

I have highlighted a few below.

Accuracast offer the following services:

# Mobile search engine optimisation
# Accessibility testing
# Usability testing
# Multilingual mobile site optimisation

Zealousweb is another agency that offer mobile seo services.

* Website analysis
* Mobile website design
* Mobile website development
* Mobile search engine optimisation
* Accessibility
* Keyword research
* Multilingual mobile site optimisation

Mobile search will be growing over the next year so there will be more agencies offering mobile search in 2010.

2010 is the year for mobile search

Since the iPhone was launched in June 2007, more and more people are accessing the web through their mobile. There are of course other smart phones on the market place, but the iPhone was the one that made it easy to surf the web and the first handset to introduce apps.

Since 2007, there has been two more releases of the iPhone – iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS as well as the Android G1, HTC Magic and the Motorola DEXT, plus not forgetting the Palm Pre.

So this year is set to be the year where more people are accessing the web through their handset.

According to Morgan Stanley , more customers will access the internet through their mobiles than PCs within 5 years. It also states that the Mobile Internet market will be “at least 2x size of Desktop Internet,”. Morgan Stanley bases this on analysis comparing Internet users with mobile subscribers.

The growth of the mobile internet is due to the adoption 3G and increasing popularity of smartphones, the leader being the iPhone. Morgan Stanley predict smartphones “will out-ship the global notebook + netbook market in 2010E and out-ship the global PC market (notebook + netbook + desktop) by 2012″

So for those who have never thought about mobile search, now is the time. Check out my other blog post about mobile search.

Mobile search news

2009 is the year of mobile search.
Google have developed their offering of mobile search over the past year which covered some key milestones.

- In April they launched Product Search for Android and iPhone
- In July they launched Product Search for other web enabled phones. Product search allows users to read product ratings and reviews while you are shopping helping you to get the best deals.
- In June Google launched a new version of iGoogle for Android and iPhone devices making more of desktop iGoogle gadgets available on the mobile.
- August saw Image Search results optimised for feature phones.
- In September they launched the mobile version of Fast Flip for Android and iPhone, allowing users to scan news articles quickly.
- In October they launched Search Options for Android, iPhone and Palm WebOS phones, allowing users to further refine search results to get the information they are after.

To find more about mobile search visit google’s blog.

I will be adding more shortly.