Everyone is going mobile and if you aren’t going mobile you really should because so many people are going mobile. Over the past year mobile traffic has risen 200% from 2010. Tablet traffic alone grew 440% in the past year. If you aren’t advertising to these people or have a website that is optimize for mobile traffic, you are losing out on the millions of dollars that is out there.
Last year people were wondering if they should start a mobile site, this year people are starting them. If you aren’t doing this you are going to be screwed in the next year. If you are a lone wolf out there and want to make some money, learn how to make mobile sites. You can make millions if you know how to do this. You can also start new advertising models and take advantage of the people that aren’t going mobile. If you don’t, someone else will. Everyone be warned. If you aren’t building mobile sites and bidding on mobile PPC ads, then you will lose tons of money.
According to Google:
- 79% of smartphone consumers use their phones to help with shopping, from comparing prices, to finding more product info, to locating a retailer.
- 70% use their smartphones while in a store.
- 77% have contacted a business via mobile, with 61% calling and 59% visiting the local business.
- 44% of searches for last minute gifts this holiday season will come through mobile phones.
- Mobile searches on Black Friday rose 200% from last year.
Googlebot-Mobile announced earlier this week that it now crawls with a smartphone user-agent in addition to is previous feature phone users-agents. Google wants to improve user experience through mobile phones and this will start now. All mobile search queries will be optimized to work with mobile devices. This means that all mobile searches will go through the following user-agent strings:
Feature phones Googlebot-Mobile:
SAMSUNG-SGH-E250/1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 UP.Browser/6.2.3.3.c.1.101 (GUI) MMP/2.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
DoCoMo/2.0 N905i(c100;TB;W24H16) (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Smartphone Googlebot-Mobile:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Google also announced that they will be redirecting all redirects to the final URL that the redirects go to. So if you have 10 different redirects on your website, it will just show up in mobile search as the final page. I really don’t know yet if this is going to pass on all the value (if you do a 301 redirect) to your mobile page and up it in the rankings or not but I assume it will in the future if it doesn’t now. This is a really cool function that I have wanted in the mobile advertising space for a long time.
Another new feature that Google just released is Custom Search Ads. These little gems allow you to customize the ads that you put in-front of people. For example I own Pixloo virtual tours. We have thousands of people that search on our website for homes. Now I can customize the ads that I show to the individual search queries on our site. I can even customize the text, background color, and look and feel of the ad. This will allow me to customize it to the individual.
If you would like to participate in this new feature, you will have to apply on the Custom Search Ads page.
