If you’re running a multi-channel marketing campaign, most brands recognise that each execution must be tweaked for each medium – with online often lumped together. But with many different ways to access digital media, is an opportunity being missed in paid search?
Often AdWord campaigns on desktop, mobile and tablet are all crammed into the same campaign, or even worse, mobile and tablets are not being considered at all. But things are changing, and device segmentation is now coming to the forefront of paid search.
Many people create a paid search campaign in Google and a separate campaign in Bing, because although it only has a small share of the market, there is still a notable level of traffic through the channel that is worth targeting. However, we have found that while Bing had a 6.43% share of paid search, mobile and tablet devices made up 12.98% of all paid search traffic, which begs the question: why segment for Bing and not for mobile?
When it comes to the actual segmentation, the creation of separate campaigns should just be the first step as different devices need to be treated differently.
Separate ad scheduling strategies may be necessary. While mobile and tablet devices drive higher levels of search traffic during the morning and evening, desktop computers deliver the highest volumes during the day.
Secondly, the way people search differs depending on the devices. As people tend to use mobiles and tablets on-the-go, and so there is a greater level of location based searches which should be reflected in the keyword strategy.
Finally, it is good to bear in mind the differences in advertising real-estate. On desktop your ads can be in position four or five and still be towards the top of the page, but on a mobile device this is only true for the first two ads, and so a different bidding strategy may be needed.
Where businesses do not have a mobile site, mobile PPC campaigns may want to give people the option of getting in touch without having to go onto the actual website itself, maybe through a click to call option or call back request link, rather than driving traffic to the site.
Therefore, it is imperative that different devices are segmented. They are likely to give you different CPCs and CPAs, but without segmentation it is impossible to know which are the most profitable options for your campaigns.
Matthew Oxley is head of search at Gravytrain
