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NOTE: This article original appear on Mobile Marketer.com. You can find it here: http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/opinion/columns/8657.html

In a previous post, I outlined a framework for describing mobile websites.  The goal there was to outline a set of experience and execution standards and site features that can help marketers evaluate the evolution of their mobile web presence.

In fact, what should precede the development of your mobile website are decisions about the type of experience you can and want to offer your customers. Each potential experience can be linked to your business and brand objectives. And there’s no reason why any particular approach shouldn’t be viewed as an evolutionary step towards a deep mobile web experience.

Here’s a survey of four types of mobile web experiences you can offer your customers:

1. Conversion-Led

The conversion-led approach prioritizes customer acquisition. Generally speaking, you’re looking at mobile as a channel extension of your CRM or promotions funnel.  These sites could be mobile optimized versions of your contest micro-sites or loyalty programs. And it’s likely they’re having traffic driven to them via other channels – either mobile like SMS or mobile advertising or through non-interactive media prompts like print or TV ads.

It’s fair to say that the conversion-led approach is more akin to a landing page strategy where light weight sites are used to provide a frictionless continuation of a brand experience. Key to a successful conversion-led approach is appreciation and iron-willed adherence to a customer-centric value exchange. Make it very clear what you want the consumer to do. Give them an offer that makes it worth their while. Make the design experience suit the medium.

2. Look-up-Led

This approach is arguably the best starting point for any brand marketer looking for a sustained mobile presence. It sets a foundation that can be easily built upon. Its intent is to address the most pressing needs for the widest variety of customers.

The essence of the Look-Up-Led approach is the recognition that a customer visiting your site on their mobile phone is most likely there to find a very specific piece of information which they can they apply to their daily tasks or current circumstances.

Contact or location information would be the best example of this but it would also include price or schedule checking or other product background information (nutrition information, for example, if you’re a QSR or CPG company).

3. Transaction-Led

With a transaction-led approach you’re focussing on driving product purchase. That may mean enabling on device transactions. But it can also be about increasing purchase intent through more immersive product experiences or bridging customers from device to retail through incentives or concierge-like interactions.

Consumer comfort with on-device transactions is definitely on the rise and you can encourage that behaviour by porting familiar shopping chart cues to your mobile site. Existing account authentication, transaction security and clear progress metering are important. Customer support channels should be prominently displayed and will minimize shopping cart abandonment.

Having on-device ordering with in-store pick up is a complementary feature to direct on-device commerce and one that also stands up well on its own. Many customers may come to your site with look-up intent. Price comparisons or inventory availability may be their initial focus but by allowing customers to reserve goods on device and schedule pick up at their preferred location can turn window shopping into revenue.  You can also manage that ‘clicks to bricks’ experience through mobile couponing where site visitors can unlock coupons good for their next visit.

4. Content-Led

Publishers, TV networks, and others whose business is based on producing a steady stream of content are the obvious candidates for this approach. But they are not the only ones.  The content-led approach can be the evolution of the look-up-led approach and a companion to the transaction-led approach.

The main attributes of this approach are well structured category architecture, a deep and searchable content library, multi-channel sharing (email, SMS, social media, etc…) and multi-media content formats.  A content-led approach also benefits from allowing visitors to specify content preferences. While easier to do on a native app, a minimalist registration option can allow for saved preferences and make for meaningful and frequent visits. That can be a real benefit if you’re looking to monetize your content through advertising.

Your own mobile web presence may not fit neatly into just one of these categories. As I mentioned with the content-led approach, combining elements of each may make the most sense given your business and marketing objectives.

What should be front and centre regardless of the chosen approach is an evolutionary view where initial efforts are monitored and visitor traffic data is fed back into your content and design strategies and implementations.

The mobile web is becoming increasingly important and many expect it to overtake native applications as the primary source of customer mobile data consumption. Be prepared. Take advantage.

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We know that Smartphone use is on the rise and with it comes more people reading emails on their mobile. Market research firm Nielsen condensed all time spent on the mobile internet into one hour and found nearly half of it was spent on email.  This is a very telling statistic because it goes beyond corporate, Blackberry-centric, email use to include consumers accessing Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail via their devices.

That’s important as Blackberries, despite their generally justified status as a workplace productivity hero, are hopeless at handling the sort of HTML emails that marketers deploy. Images are off, links are exposed and the whole point of creating email eye-candy is defeated. I’m confident this will be sorted out shortly but it’s the current reality. And it’s one that has driven the existing mobile email paradigm.

The Current State of Mobile Email

Marketers that do created ‘mobile friendly’ versions of their emails (and, if we’re being candid, most still don’t) typically take the following approach: In the pre-header of the email there’s a link saying something like ‘On a mobile device? Click here’. Clicking on that link will do one of two things – take the recipient to a text only version or take them to a mobile web page recreating the richer HTML experience. The latter is clearly more favourable from a branding + presentation POV.

iPhones and Android devices do a much better job handling HTML emails. Images are displayed, for starters. But email design is web-centric.  Multi-column emails are common and with mobile’s smaller screen sizes lead to tiresome side to side scrolling. It’s a cumbersome reading experience.

According to the PEW Internet & American Life Project, 34% of all cell phone owners have sent or received an email on their device. This number is slightly higher than the percentage of cell phone owners that have Smartphones but is conclusive enough to confidently say, at a minimum, “Smartphone users = mobile email user.”

With Smartphone penetration set to overtake feature phones in the next year or two and only continue upward, the implication should be clear: The approach to email marketing needs to evolve to account for changing consumer consumption patterns and expectations.

Your emails are being viewed on devices you haven’t designed and tested for and in contexts than a web-centric email approach simply doesn’t account for leading to lost opportunities to capture interest.

Making Email Work for the Mobile Consumer

To make your email marketing programs work harder and extract more value out of each interaction with a mobile consumer, there are three dimensions to address: Design, Content, and Destinations.

1. Design

Consider a design template that’s if not mobile-first, than at least mobile-sensitive. Employ a single column layout consistent with mobile screen dimensions to remove unnecessary pinching, zooming and scrolling and to focus reader attention.  A vertical scroll motion allows for a more natural email reading experience, especially on a mobile device.

Think about larger fonts, bigger call to action button, and more minimalist colour palettes with high contrast between design elements. Your design should make it extremely easy for recipients to differentiate content elements and provide intuitive, obvious action elements that account for a user who will be grazing information rather than reading deeply.

I’d also recommend keeping a text only or mobile web optimized version linked from the pre-header. Many Blackberry users will still need this and it’s good practice to be inclusive of all customers in your design (that’s why you’re looking at a mobile-centric design in the first place, after all).

2. Content

Mobile email readers will be looking for focussed, attention grabbing content.  Consumption will most likely happen during brief moments of downtime.

Combine on-the-go relevance with actionable information with a very sharp editing pencil. Clear but attention grabbing calls to action are at an even greater premium in a mobile context.   This may involve rethinking your content organization as the mobile consumer is best served by information that satisfies moments of inspiration or need vs. contemplation.  The best advice is “don’t overdo it”. Information overload will lead to session abandonment as quickly as a poorly designed email. Brevity and clarity will show you’re sensitive to demands on a recipient’s time and attention.

There’s a lot to be gained from allowing recipients to specify ‘web’ or ‘mobile’ versions as well. Knowledge of how they’ll be viewing your emails can give you a glimpse into how content should be prioritized.

3. Destinations

This is the most important piece. There is no point optimizing design and content for mobile consumption if someone clicks on a link (that’s what you likely want them to do, right?) only to end up on a desktop web experience. All your hard work will be lost.

Building your mobile web destination involves the same content and design sensibilities you’ve applied to your emails.  There’s a lot to be said on this topic and I outlined a foundational lens in a previous post, “Making the Mobile Web a Friendlier Place”. [Stay tuned for a follow up piece on content approaches to your mobile web presence...]

Once you’ve locked down a mobile friendly design, content and destination approach, there are a couple other considerations that can impact your open and engagement rates:

• Send times: Mobile email consumption is more likely going to be in snatched moments of downtime or media multi-tasking. Consider when those are going to be for your customer. Better yet, allow customers to state when they would like to receive your emails.
• Cross-channel opt-ins: Mobile email can be a great way to nurture customers into mobile CRM extensions. Provide mechanisms for users to opt-in to SMS programming. Enable coupon redemption by having device ‘show and save’ or ‘show and scan’ capabilities. Push customers to your mobile apps or other content downloads such as videos or wallpapers.

Now, rather than being a ‘blinders on’ promoter of mobile, I’m realistic in that not all marketers need a mobile friendly email program. You may be able to survive without it depending on your audience demographics. Teen and Older demographics are probably not a mobile email/Smartphone sweet spot. But if your customer base includes urban consumers, 18-45, there’s a good chance you have a growing segment that will expect a tailored, even optimized, experience no matter when or how they happen to view your emails.

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As advertisers devote an increasing share of their media budgets to mobile advertising, experimental campaigns are morphing into sustained efforts.  Even those brands just getting started in the channel will have heard the success stories and won’t be satisfied with ‘seeing what happens’.

Results matter and maximizing ROI or driving toward pre-defined, tangible goals places increased pressure on effective campaign management and optimization. Clear and measureable campaign objectives are the essential starting point. Acknowledging mobile as a powerful direct response channel and building in conversion points will improve targeting efforts.

However, simply setting up your campaign and letting it run its course denies the opportunity to leverage the rich data set that mobile advertising generates. Device, time, content, creative, destination and conversion metrics are among the points across which a campaign can be evaluated. Knowing how to interpret and translate that data into in-flight campaign optimization can mean the difference between a successful campaign and a failure.

Let’s get some assumptions out of the way:

1. You’ve done your homework and have a good sense of which devices your target audiences are likely to be using (or you’re casting a wide net across mobile users).
2. You have a mobile-friendly post-click destination. If you’re driving to a wired web destination go back to the drawing board.
3. You have access to media and conversion performance data in the shape of publisher/network reporting and post click tracking using Google Analytics or a mobile analytics service.
4. You’re a savvy enough planner – or work with one – so your media buy is leveraging properties with good content affinity to your message and your audience.
5. You’re working with a publisher/network that will let you adjust campaign targeting in-flight.  (I’ve yet to work with one that won’t; it’s in their best interest.)

At the very least you’ll be seeing the top-line reach and response stats – impressions, clicks, and click through rates (CTRs). These are helpful in providing a baseline for measuring your optimization efforts.  Content, geographic, time and device-specific reporting are the next level of mineable data.

The second baseline measure will be conversions. If you’ve managed to get consumers to click on your ad, don’t simply direct them to a flat landing page. Instead, have some response or engagement points to take advantage of the click. With that in place, you’ll be able to generate conversion rates or engagement levels.

Now that you have your campaign set up and you’re collecting performance data, here’s a list of questions you need to ask yourself to identify opportunities that will enable performance improvement via ongoing optimization:

Media Metrics

1. What are you CTRs by creative unit? Run multiple calls to action or creative treatments and adjust weight according to performance.
2. What are you CTRs by time? Focus on day parting to deliver more impressions when your message has the greatest currency.
3. What are you CTRs by device? Device metrics go a long way towards validating audience profile assumptions and ensuring relevant offers, content and design strategies.
4. Which content or context (e.g. location) dimensions are performing best? Cross-reference those results with creative, time and device CTRs.
5. Are your mobile search keyword groups fully exploiting aligned location or urgency searches? Search is a low cost, high conversion channel when deployed sensibly and managed properly.

Conversion Metrics

1. What content is generating the most views on your landing pages? Remember, mobile content consumption will likely follow a different pattern from web browsing.
2. Are there choke points in your conversion funnel? With multi-page interactions (e.g. registrations), you may notice drop off at certain points. Streamline the process to minimize friction and maximize familiar behaviour triggers.
3. What are the conversion comparisons between different devices? Could your content or design strategy be adjusted to take advantage of device browser or feature capabilities?
4. How do your conversions compare across geographies? What happens when you layer on device data to that metric? How about time of day metrics? Tweak your media to follow those patterns.
5. If you’re attributing revenue to your conversions, are some sources more profitable than others? How are different offers translating to conversion rates?

While some of these might seem obvious and different conversion points (e.g. landing pages, downloads, coupons, commerce, etc.) have unique dimensions to address, the fulcrum for mobile advertising success is the effective use of the added data layers that mobile devices, context and design/content strategies offer.

Be Smart. Tip the scales in your favour by acting on in-campaign reporting.

NOTE: This post appears as part of Mobile Marketer’s Classic Guide to Mobile Advertising 2010 package. You can get the full guide here.

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For all the talk of operating system fragmentation becoming a development burden in the mobile space (and it is a big issue), I’d argue that another type of fragmentation poses an even greater challenge for marketers looking to intelligently explore and evolve their mobile programming options

Welcome to the age of customer fragmentation.

Customer fragmentation for mobile, as I define it, has both a ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ definition. At the macro level it concerns how a marketer’s target audience is rarely neatly confined to a single device family or operating system. Marketers will have customers that use iPhones, Android devices, Blackberries and so on. Investment decisions need to be made about which platforms and device features offer the optimal mix of reach, experience and response.

At the macro level, there’s also the issue of distinguishing between Smartphone users and non-Smartphone users and whether SMS (for example) would prove to be a more effective channel than a native application.

However, it’s at the micro level that added wrinkles place emphasis on smart customer persona definition and segmentation activities that should be a part of any thorough and thoughtful marketing exercise.

Even within broad segments such as ‘iPhone users’, there are nuances in how device features are used by individual consumers. Massive app download numbers may suggest that everyone is an app user, but how is that overall trend distributed among ‘gamers’, ‘productivity fiends’, ‘social networkers’, and ‘brand loyalists’?

The same can be said for Blackberry users.  Deep enterprise penetration means a strong core of white collar email power users, but Blackberry has also been gaining traction among younger audiences who are addicted to the Blackberry instant messaging client.

Of course, then you need to consider how SMS, LBS service and camera use may be distributed among your customers by age, geography or demographic profiles.  And perhaps the mobile web is the better choice given any number of reasons from development costs to how customers interact with your existing brand assets.

Before hands get thrown up in frustration, it’s worth noting that the costs and time required for smart customer profiling and segmentation will be recouped many times over as you create a foundation for value-laden programming that delivers genuine and recurring utility.

Here are 5 tips for effectively addressing customer fragmentation:

Use existing assets to gather direct-from-customer data

You already probably have a website, an email list, a bricks and mortar location and so on. Use these as vehicles for asking questions and gathering observations about how your customers want to be engaged via mobile.

Mine existing 3^rd party research and validate against existing customer profiles

Market research firms are perpetually pumping out reports on various consumer habits, preferences and activities. Publishers, ad networks and industry associations routinely trumpet audience data. Take advantage.

Be thorough with competitive analysis and extract learning from in-market examples

Case studies abound. Most brand apps are free for you to download and pick apart user experiences.  Nearly every phone has a browser and SMS campaigns are easy to enter. Put some thumbs to phone and discover what works and what doesn’t.

Analytics, Analytics, Analytics

Your website’s analytics package should tell you what mobile devices and operating systems are hitting your site. There will be some. How do those results index against wired web norms? Tools like MapInfo (Disclosure: a sister company of my employer Digital Cement) offer deep postal code level data on consumer behaviour and preferences.

Pilot programs with lower barriers to entry to gain deeper insights

Perhaps my most important recommendation is ‘try stuff’. You can’t beat running a real world campaign for actionable insight. Mobile advertising and mobile search are a good way to start and developing a mobile landing page can be very cost effective. Create mobile friendly versions of your email campaigns. Most SMS providers offer the use of shared short codes to help minimize start up costs.

If you find yourself thinking I’m not saying anything new, perfect. You have the right orientation for maximizing mobile marketing returns. If your agency is recommending a mobile program without this kind of leg work or justification….well, you know.

The velocity with which consumers are integrating mobile into their lives is only slightly ahead of their expectation to be able to get what they want, when they want it on the device. Your customers will want to find you there if they don’t already.

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At Digital Cement, we’re focused on digital direct marketing. As part of articulating our POV on how specific digital channels can be used in effect customer acquisition efforts, I wrote a white paper on mobile as a direct marketing channel.

Here’s the intro to give you a flavour for the paper’s scope and focus:

The paper is a survey of these subjects rather than an exhaustive treatise.  It’s meant to provide thought starters for deploying mobile marketing programs in a way that sets the foundation for sustainable growth and verifiable success framed by a customer-centric approach.

You can find the paper here.

Hope you find it interesting and useful. Feedback, as always, is welcome.

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NOTE: Cross-posted from the Digital Cement Round Table Blog

What’s your mobile marketing strategy? Don’t have one? You’re not alone.

Recent research by Forrester found that 57% from a survey pool of 200 global companies either didn’t have one or only in the early stages of developing their mobile strategy.

If you do have a mobile strategy, that’s excellent. The question then is how you are going to continue to evolve your mobile programming and adapt to emerging technology opportunities and changes in customer habits, preferences, expectations, device use and build on insights from all the data you’ve generated.

Defining and maturing your mobile strategy requires a thoughtful and diligent approach if you want to deliver genuine and recurring value to your customers and maximize ROI.  It’s more than just porting your web strategy. There are new customer behaviours to understand.  Different dynamics for acquisition, engagement, conversion and retention activities are in play.  Benefits and costs for each mobile tactical channels – advertising, web, apps, SMS, etc… – need to be weighed. A new measurement and analytics process has to be established.

Digital Cement wants to help you through that process.

We’ve developed the Mobile Maturity Diagnostic so marketers can self-assess the progress of their mobile marketing efforts and gather insight into sustainable and sensible program evolution.

We’re deliberately channel-agnostic. You won’t find out whether you should use SMS or build an app, for example. Those decisions are unique to every company, brand or targeted customer segment. What you will find out are the steps you can take to make sure you have the right framework for making those decisions.

We’ve broken out mobile strategy into 6 categories:

• Audience Management
• Marketing Planning
• Marketing Implementation
• Media Management
• Data + Measurement
• Integration

Each category asks you to align yourself to the descriptive statement closest to your activity level. Have fun with it. Check out each of the statements as they’ll give you insight into the road ahead.

As you progress through each section, we’ll tally up your score and at the end you’ll receive a snapshot of your mobile maturity status and some prescriptive guidance for next steps.

The Diagnostic has a web and touch screen mobile optimized versions. You can try the mobile version by directing your iPhone, Android or other webkit browsers to the same URL as the website: http://www.digitalcement.com/mobile_ready.

We’re looking at this tool as something that evolves as brand mobile marketing sophistication evolves so your feedback on the content is definitely welcome.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Digital Cement can assist you in developing your mobile marketing roadmap, there’s a form on the site or contact me directly at jdunn@digitalcement.com

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A recent report from dotMobi has documented the staggering rise in the number of mobile websites in the past two years.

From 2008 to 2010 the number of mobile compatible websites grew from 150,000 to 3.01 million. For the stats hungry playing along at home, that’s apparently a 2000% increase. Yes. 2000%.

Of the Alexa.com top 1000 sites, 40.1% are mobile friendly as are 29.7% of the top 10,000. There’s more info here on the report if you’re interested.

This is all very good. I’m firmly in the camp that argues brands need to have a distinct mobile version of their web presence to ensure positive experiences for their customers. Browsing on the mobile web is a different beast from web browsing. Along with the unique capabilities and design parameters native to mobile devices, customer habits and expectations are different when they’re browsing on their mobile phone.

If you’re reading this closely, however, you’ll notice I used the phrases ‘mobile compatible’ and ‘mobile friendly’ to characterize the findings from the study. At first pass, these may seem like minor variations of the same thing – a matter of preference, really. I believe they’re not and that’s why I want to issue a call for some standardization – or at least consistency – around mobile website description [read on to find out why...].

I’ve found there are 4 main ways mobile websites are described:

• Mobile Accessible
• Mobile Compatible
• Mobile Friendly
• Mobile Optimized

In most cases, these terms are used fairly interchangeably.

If you’re asking “what difference does it make,” consider this: Any HTML website could be ‘mobile accessible’ if it displays fully on a mobile browser (vs. any site using Flash which won’t work on nearly all phones). However, a  website designed only with PC browsing in mind will be poorly formatted for the mobile screen, require significant and unnecessary user actions to discover relevant content and will likely have a massive amount of content which is simply irrelevant to a mobile browsing customer…to name just some of the problems.

A ‘mobile accessible’ website is unlikely how you want your company to be portrayed and perceived or the type of experience you want to serve up to your customers.

In the interests of injecting greater precision into the conversation around mobile web experiences, I’ve drafted the following mobile website segmentation.  Let’s consider this a baseline definition exercise, open to revision as technology and mobile experience sophistication evolves.

1. Mobile Accessible

A mobile ‘accessible’ site is one where a visitor can get all the content and all design elements are displayed.  However, the design and content strategy is indistinct from the PC version and the mobile browsing experience is poor or frustrating.

Example: Do a random Google search on your phone and take your pick.

2. Mobile Compatible

A mobile ‘compatible’ site is one that is formatted for mobile browsers/browsing. It uses mobile friendly programming languages and a design approach that exploits mobile gestures and minimizes content load times.  There is a content architecture that considers a mobile customer’s context, interest and intent.  Your site is hosted as a sub domain on your primary URL and device detection should be implemented to recognize mobile users. Some search and/or sharing features are also in place. Mobile-specific analytics are in place to track site performance and customer behaviour.

Good Example: http://m.cnn.com

3. Mobile Friendly

A mobile ‘friendly’ site is one that builds on the mobile-centric design, content and analytics practices begun in the mobile ‘compatible’ category. Device detection has definitely been added to deliver versions that cater to the unique screen size and processing capabilities of the many distinct operating systems and screen types and sizes available.  Search and social sharing features are tightly integrated and resolve themselves in an equally mobile friendly way. Transactional capabilities and/or account authentication that allows for a personalized experience (if relevant to your business) have been implemented. There is also a customer feedback or support mechanism.

Good Examples: http://m.bestbuy.com and http://mobile.dominos.com

4. Mobile Optimized

A mobile ‘optimized’ website takes all the best practices from mobile ‘friendly’ design and layers in features that are only available with certain programming languages (HTML 5 in particular) to access supported advanced device capabilities (HD content, location, camera, accelerometer, etc…) to deliver a rich and immersive experience.

Good Example: http://m.youtube.com

(Built w. HTML5. Not currently taking advantage of all the capabilities but a good place to watch for innovation).

A couple other notes:

• For the time being at least, any site using Flash is not mobile anything. True, some operating systems and devices do support Flash but it still bogs down the browsing experience and is not yet ready for mobile primetime.
• Pinch and zoom should not be considered an acceptable user gesture. It is at best a stop gap excuse for mobile accessible sites still figuring out their design and content strategy. It is clumsy and asks already fickle mobile customers to do far too much to get where they want to go.

Those who know more about mobile programming than I seem to be in favour of HTML5 becoming the de facto mobile web programming standard.  However, that means this segmentation automatically precludes most of the best mobile websites around today from being more than ‘mobile friendly’.

Frankly, that’s okay. I think being ‘mobile friendly’ is a great place to be and if we had most marketers pushing for ‘mobile friendly’ status the mobile universe would be vastly improved.  Mobile ‘optimized’ is such a strong term that it should remain a stretch target allowing for evolution and revolution that takes full advantage of device capabilities.

I hope you’ll join me in adopting this language for describing mobile websites. Consistency in this conversation will help drive up design and experience standards and create reference points for marketers gauging the maturity of their mobile presence.

But first, did I miss any common phrases for describing mobile websites? Do you agree with my characterizations?

Did you get to the end of this post before checking your own website on your mobile phone…?

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There are two things I feel comfortable saying nearly every mobile consumer has done at some point – made a phone call + taken a picture.

Consider how intuitive those behaviours are and how seamlessly they fit into people’s mobile activity patterns.  It’s natural behaviour because they’re ported from other device interactions (telephone, camera) to a mobile interaction. Just about the only new learning is which button do you press to make it happen.

What marketers should be thinking about it is hearing and seeing customer intent.

Voice and image recognition technologies are evolving rapidly. I’ll be giving more thought to how it impacts brand interface and enriches experiential moments.  For now, just putting those two words out there so they can ripen on the vine.

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During a recent keynote address at the IFA consumer electronics conference in Berlin, Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke of the “age of augmented humanity”. Grand language aside, the core of this statement is the convergence of massive amounts of knowledge and technology smart enough to operate autonomously enough to anticipate what we want to know and deliver it when we need it.

This will probably trigger all kinds of predictions and warnings about creepy scenarios of computers dominating humans but it has a real world utility as Mr. Schmidt highlights in this example: “When you ask ‘what’s the weather like?’ what you’re really asking is do I wear a raincoat or do I water the plants.”

This kind of contextual relevance has always been a cornerstone of mobile marketing but it’s increasingly relevant as location and activity aware Smartphones earn greater market share.  This is backed up by some stats Mr. Schmidt shared during the same keynote address:

• 1 in 3 queries from Smartphones are now seeking information about nearby places
• Google’s mobile search traffic grew 50 percent in first half of 2010

What these numbers indicate is that consumers are increasingly porting search activity previously confined to the desktop over to their mobile device and are adding in the layer of solving contextually relevant problems.

But let’s expand on the notion of contextual search and acknowledge that search activities occur outside of the traditional confines of the search engine. Here are a couple of search scenarios that occur within branded environments rather than traditional search engines:

• I’m looking for a place to eat. Rather than doing a Google search for restaurants, I fire up the Urban Spoon or Yelp apps.
• I want to see if there’s a Best Buy near me and if they have the case I need for my iPhone. I tap in their URL to my mobile browser, get served up their mobile optimized website and search for the product and the closest location where I can get it.

I could easily outline other scenarios but these two serve the purpose of highlighting two other mobile search behaviours:

• Activity-specific search enabled by a 3^rd party content aggregation application
• Direct to brand “search” (for a mobile friendly destination) based on aligned and pre-established preferences.

These activities already exist within web behaviour. However, many organizations are not yet optimized to capitalize on this type of discovery via mobile. Not addressing these behaviours can have unfortunate effects on both brand favourability and sales.

While it’s harder to influence 3^rd party apps, you can earn a lot of easy wins by having a mobile version of your website to address clicks out of apps or another 3^rd party source and direct to brand searches.

However, consumers are fickle when it comes to mobile browsing. If sites fail to load quickly or it’s hard to find what they’re looking for, they will quickly navigate away and look for other solutions. I can pretty much guarantee that’s happening if your website isn’t mobile optimized (and heaven forbid you’re using flash…warning: link requires high degree of geek).

So what are the steps you can take to ensure you’re capitalizing on mobile search activity?

I’d suggest focussing on three types of outcomes: 1. Ease of discovery; 2. Customer acquisition; 3. Maximizing conversions.

1. Discovery:

This is the most important activity and should begin with the question: “what happens when someone visits my website on their mobile device?” If the answer is anything other than ‘easily finds what they’re looking for thanks to a mobile-centric design and content strategy’, there’s work to do.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be overly time- and cost-consuming work.  A well thought out landing page that includes one or two of the most likely mobile actions (or relevant offers) and uses device detection to serve up the mobile version anytime a mobile browser hits the URL may be enough. In the long term, a more fully-formed site will be essential but a focus on addressing the most pressing problems a consumer visiting your site will be looking to solve is a great starting point.

The added advantage of a landing page is you can tailor it to serve as a destination for more concerted acquisition efforts. Or you can build multiple pages to serve unique purposes and campaigns given the lightweight development costs. If you invest proper time and thought in planning your landing page strategy, before you know it you’ll have the core of a robust mobile web experience.

2. Acquisition:

Having a mobile optimized site will go a long way towards driving down bounce rates and provide a valuable new set of data around device-specific use and general customer mobile preferences.

At the same time you’re addressing organic discovery, focus efforts on paid discovery. Mobile search is still a tiny sliver in the overall search revenue pie, but it’s a great time to capitalize on the increasing consumer use and the novelty factor.  While volume relative to wired search will be low, we’ve seen higher click-through and conversion rates on the whole.

Mobile search does require a distinct approach. Of course, there’s the post-click experience and device targeting dimensions and Google has done a great job rolling out innovative and compelling mobile-specific ad units that leverage mobile device features.  But you also have to consider the relevance of your offers and copy to the mobile customer as well as how the unique contextual dimensions of mobile will impact your keyword selections. Starting with brand terms is the obvious choice, but you might find that limiting in the mid to longer term.

3. Conversion:

Most of the common customer conversion best practices from web search still hold true. The new mobile specific dimensions worth mentioning here concern paying attention to streamlining the conversion funnel and ensuring a seamless bridging between any subsequent experiences.

Anything you can do to minimize the number of steps a consumer has to go through to complete the conversion cycle will be to your advantage. This includes data entry fields, number of pages until gratification, and clear and compelling explanations of a customer-centric value exchange.

On the subject of the value exchange, you will do better the more seamlessly you can bridge customers between two (or more) on-device experiences or enable a ‘clicks to bricks’ interaction that can be facilitated or enhanced through mobile use. Some common examples would be a click to a mobile coupon, sign up for a email newsletter that’s mobile optimized, or a push to a mobile download (app, ringtone, wallpaper, etc…).

The final point to consider in extracting the most benefit out of your mobile search activities is thorough use of analytics. Google Analytics, which you are probably already using for your website and web search activities, provides a more than adequate solution for extracting participation and conversion data. It will also allow you to gather insights into customer visits and actions by device or operating systems which will provide actionable insights for future campaign optimization and mobile property development.

The key to getting started in mobile search is to frame your activity with a test and learn mentality and be thoughtful about the end to end experience to minimize friction points for consumers. This will help you develop a sustainable brand presence in the mobile channel and extract an actionable data set.

Note: this has been cross-posted on the Digital Cement blog. Lots of other good content there too, fyi

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Mobile will save publishing. Maybe. The iPad will save publishing. Maybe. Some yet to be imagined device will save publishing. Maybe. Let’s face it. We don’t know what will save publishing.

Or do we? Has the answer been in front of us the whole time? Maybe.

Advertisers will save publishing. That is a statement I will get behind. What will save publishing is giving advertisers compelling reasons to spend money. (Side note: by publishing I am referring to any media company that drives a significant portion of their revenue through advertising)

I don’t work for a content producer, but I have in the past.  I’m on the agency side and work with publishers on mobile advertising campaigns. What I’ve experienced has led me to two conclusions:

1. Mobile Publishing monetization models are still being worked out. (This is not what I want to talk about today but it’s a huge issue in mPublishing. And the crux may be what advertisers need to bring to the table vs. what services and solutions publishers should or can offer.)
2. Campaign analytics and reporting are still too shallow or are rarely packaged in a way that gets agencies – and by extension their clients – as excited as they should be.

Here’s my argument:

Publishers need to deliver targeting capabilities and usage analytics robust enough to allow media buyers to make intelligent campaign planning decisions. Otherwise, monetization attempts will mostly fail as marketers search for solid foundations for calculating customer targeting, engagement and acquisition ROI.

That sounds awfully grim. The good news is that the higher than web click through rates and the ‘innovation’ play will likely be sufficient to deliver enough revenue to keep everyone pretty happy – for now, that is.  So, before that, here is my take on merging analytics and targeting in a way that makes everyone look and feel good.

I’ve broken the analytics scope into four domains: Connectivity, Consumer, Content and Conversion. Each of these domains has multiple dimensions and for the purposes of this piece I’ll keep it pretty high level.

Domain # 1: Connectivity

This is one area where most publishers are doing a good job for the most part.  That may be largely to do with the approach many have taken in offering up OS-specific native applications. I’ve found it’s rare for a publisher not to be able to execute device targeting. Many can even target specific models within a family of devices (e. g. differentiate Blackberry 9700 from 8900). Increasingly, OS and device targeting should be the minimum expectation.

The second connectivity dimension is geo-targeting. Again, most publishers seem to grasp the inherent importance of location and context in mobile and have built-in capabilities to target location to some degree.

What’s critical here is the increasing granularity in OS, device and geo-targeting to enable messaging and offers that are relevant to device capabilities and user habits and preferences.  Check out Google’s location powered AdWord units.

Domain # 2: Consumer

You could make the case convincingly that location is a consumer domain but here the consumer domain also involves demographic and behavioural dimensions.  Publishers need to know who their audience is by age, gender, income, and so on. This is a stock media targeting request and it’s what advertisers expect. Admittedly, the personal nature of the device can make this information more difficult to gather as privacy hawks circle. But it’s not insurmountable.

The Weather Network in Canada asks for, but doesn’t require, age and sex information upon app activation. That’s a good start.  The mobile ad network JumpTap has created an ad preference manager where consumers can select the types of products and services they receive ads for – and that’s even better.

If location is the ‘where’ and demographic data the ‘who’, then the next ask is the ‘when’. Publishers need to be able to deliver sophisticated day parting options to allow advertisers to heavy up-spend at those times when consumption is heaviest or when their message will have the greatest currency.

Domain # 3: Content

This is basic. Publishers need to have visibility into what content is being consumed and to what degree. Beyond that, there has to be insight into how that differs by OS, device, demographics and geography.

Of course, there’s room for conventional reporting like total unique visitors and page views in aggregate. What’s more powerful, however, is knowing page views by content category, time per visit, frequency of user visits and duration of each visit, content viewed per visit, and content sharing. Each of these represents a potential targeting opportunity and the ability to deliver this data and wrap a story around the implications of these insights will make the case more compelling.

Domain # 4: Conversion

This final domain is a little harder for publishers to report on as they might lack the downstream visibility.  The CPM monetization model also lets a lot of publishers off the hook due to its diminished focus on performance.  The other challenge is the desire to manage advertiser expectations. Committing to a click through rate or conversion percentage is more risk than most publishers could stomach.  However, I’d urge more publishers to meet advertisers half way and offer CPC or CPA models to demonstrate more tangible returns from advertiser campaigns. This suggestion might be driven by a personal bias for mobile advertising as a very compelling direct response tactic than a pure brand play. We’ll see if the iAd changes that view.

The promise of being able to deliver micro-targeting reporting is the ability to have an analytics dashboard that tells when a 34 year old male using an Android device, clicked on an ad about Offer X, while viewing a specific piece of content and a certain time of day at a specific location and then moved through to conversion.

By and large, this is possible. There are privacy and permission issues that must be respected, especially with the location dimension but such nuance is very real. And to be fair, location is not always relevant. However, layering in some of the content dimensions I outlined would create a more powerful story.

The gap is what advertisers and their agencies seem to ask for and how it’s being packaged by publishers.  If publishers are serious about maximizing revenue from the mobile channel, they need to start offering reports at that level of detail, packaging it in a way that makes is clear, compelling and actionable without having to be asked for it or it being an exercise in pulling teeth.

It may sound like I’m being too tough on publishers here. However, I do believe most publishers are working hard to figure out the space and overcome the challenges. If anything, I have sterner words for agencies and advertisers that don’t ask for or mine for valuable data to optimize their buys or deliver device- and consumer- unfriendly post-click experiences.  I still see mobile ad campaigns that click through to a wired web experience or just offer banal product information without any clear or compelling follow-on call to action. It’s shocking!

My closing call to action: If information is power, then the power of the mobile channel is potentially unprecedented. The unique, personal and contextual dimensions of the device enable a granular picture of ad interaction and response. And it shouldn’t require a multi-million dollar budget (I’m looking at you iAd…). The data exists and we should use it wisely and in a way that benefits all parties – consumers, advertisers, agencies and publishers.

NOTE: As I’m in Canada, this is mostly directed at my fellow Canucks. Publishers and agencies in other parts of the world seem to be more on top of things (correct if that’s wrong…). But if anyone gets something out of this piece, I’m happy.

I’d also really welcome dialogue on the topic from publishers. I’ll admit to not having seen the full scope of every publisher’s mobile advertising and analytics offering. If you’re a publisher and are taking steps or have solutions to bridge these gaps, please share.

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