PPC is a great way to get noticed, but not every business needs PPC in every segment. Take mobile for instance. It’s all too tempting to spend money spinning up a PPC campaign on mobile. After all, more than half of internet users are doing it through a mobile device, right?
This is a big mistake and a really easy way to waste money. Fortunately, it is also easy to see whether or not your business is ready to launch a mobile PPC campaign if you have your analytics set up correctly. Here’s what you need to look for.
- Responsive website
First, you need a mobile and tablet-friendly responsive website. Without this, any traffic you drive your site will bounce fast. Have you ever hit a website on your smartphone that you had to scroll around to see? Not very fun, right? Make sure your entire site is responsive before you think about doing mobile PPC. Otherwise, you’ll be paying for ad clicks and getting nothing for it.
- Device segmentation
Assuming you have a responsive site, now look at your incoming visitors and look at the proportion of devices used to access your website. If you’re looking at Google Analytics, for instance, you can get a division of visitors between desktop, tablet, and smartphone usage. If you’re not getting a lot of visitors through tablets and smartphones, it makes no sense to start a mobile PPC campaign. Also, if you had to rebuild your site for responsiveness you may need to wait a quarter after your site is upgraded to get a true representation of device segmentation.
- Consider your business type
You might be getting a lot of mobile traffic, but are you getting a lot of leads or sales from mobile? You want to have your visitors ready to convert as soon as they click on your ad, not days or even hours afterward. If you sell refrigeration equipment, it’s not something most people are going to buy on a snap decision on their phones. In contrast, a roadside assistance site will have a need for mobile conversions.
If you are getting a high mobile visit rate, but your business doesn’t seem likely to have mobile conversions, you can segment your AdWords spend so that a small percentage goes to mobile and the rest goes to desktop. That can provide a testbed to see if more spend is worth it in mobile.
Try analyzing these three areas of your site before your next ad spend. If you’re not getting mobile attention, have a responsive site, or have a product that caters to snap buying on mobile devices, save your money and shut off mobile PPC ads.
