Driving results on mobile with AdMob

Recently, we’ve given you a glimpse of some of the growth that AdMob has seen over the last few months.  Here are some highlights, and a few new metrics:

• The AdMob network now receives more than 2 billion ad requests per day.  This represents an increase of more than 4x in the last twelve months.
• Nine countries in the AdMob network generated more than one billion monthly ad requests in December 2010, up from one country just a year ago.
• The 10 countries in Western Europe with the most ad requests all experienced a greater than 400% growth in ad requests in 2010.
• More than half of AdMob's top 50 brand advertising campaigns in December 2010 used the AdMob Interstitial Ad Unit (NEW)
• Ad Impressions for AdMob grew more than 500% in the past year from the AdMob Interstitial Ad Unit (NEW)
• There are now over 50,000 publishers in the AdMob network that support their mobile businesses with mobile advertising (NEW)
• Hundreds of mobile publishers, including Angry Birds, are earning over $100,000 per month from AdMob ads.

AdMob’s growth is a reflection of our advertisers’ and publishers’ success with mobile display advertising.  

Here’s an example of how AdMob is helping to generate great results for our clients.  As part of their effort to promote their new S60, Volvo and their mobile agency, Mobext, the mobile marketing arm for Media Contacts and MPG, worked with AdMob to develop new rich media ad units. Volvo included a great video interstitial (check it out below) and an engaging, easy to navigate mobile website, and was able to accomplish their marketing goals as a result.

The results speak for themselves.  Volvo’s cross-platform campaign saw CTRs of 3.91%, and after the campaign, users expressed a 240% increase in brand favorability, 88% increase in purchase intent, and a 78% increase in recommendation intent.  More importantly, this campaign changed the way the car-maker has approached mobile marketing, in general.  According to Linda Gangeri, Manager, National Advertising, Volvo,

"The interactive video ads encouraged deep consumer engagement and higher response rates compared to other media running during this same time. With the proliferation of smartphone devices, this is an area that we'll continue to invest in and expect to see continued growth."

That display campaigns like Volvo’s, sophisticated by desktop standards, are now running on mobile, is a very significant development, and reminds us how much progress mobile advertising has made.  It also inspires us to keep innovating; no matter how far mobile advertising has come, we’ve still only scratched the surface.

Jason Spero, Director, Mobile

AdMob helps drive downloads of woZZon Android app with city level geo-targeted campaign

We've been doing some work in the UK to promote the woZZon mobile application to Android users that highlights how geo-targeting can provide great returns for advertisers. WoZZon is one of the UK's largest events listings database, providing information on films, theatre, concerts, exhibitions, comedy, clubs, dance, opera, family days out and community events.

To demonstrate woZZon's insight into local events across the UK, woZZon teamed up with digital agency Yodel to develop a location-based mobile advertising campaign running on popular Android applications on our network. Together, we created geo-targeted regional banner ads offering city-specific messages for users in seven major UK cities. For example – ‘Free app for movies in London’ or 'Fancy a day out in Manchester?'

For Android users outside of these cities, a slightly more generic banner ad was displayed, such as ‘Free app for local concerts'. To find out more about the woZZon application and to download it, users simply had to click on the banner and they were taken directly through to the download page.

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This highly-targeted location-based approach meant that woZZon was able to identify areas across the UK where the app was particularly popular and focus its ad spend accordingly. Taking this geo-located approach also helped to increase downloads significantly. The localised ads were found to generate CTR and CTD rates that were 85 percent higher than those achieved by the more generic nationwide ads.

Before the launch of the mobile advertising campaign, the woZZon app was 89th in the Android UK download charts. Once the campaign kicked off, the app quickly jumped up to 11th in the travel download chart. It remained in the Top 15 throughout the course of the month. As a result, woZZon is experiencing more than double the amount of daily downloads than prior to the launch of the campaign. To learn more about woZZon, please download the full case study pdf.

Posted by Matt Brocklehurst, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

Global Mobile Perspectives: Brazil

Last week, we shared in the regional breakdown for the 2 billion daily ad requests on the AdMob network.  As shown in the data, the rapid growth that we highlighted is not restricted to any one country or market. Throughout this quarter, we’ll be posting perspectives from different markets to learn about unique country trends, challenges and opportunities in mobile.

This week we have a guest post from Peter Fernandez, who leads mobile advertising partnerships for Latin America across the Google Mobile Ads and AdMob products, on his perspective on the latest mobile trends in Brazil.

Brazil has one of the largest populations of mobile phone users in the world and last year we saw a significant increase in the number of Brazilians accessing the Internet on these devices.  This is likely driven by operator investments in infrastructure and significant price drops in mobile data prices, including pre-paid services.  For the first time, operators have seen revenue from data plans exceed revenue from messaging services.  Given that less than a quarter of Brazilian households have fixed broadband access, mobile is poised to become an important Internet access point in the future.

What are these millions of Brazilians doing when they connect to the mobile Internet? In just the past year Google mobile search traffic in Brazil has increased over 500%, whereas Google mobile search traffic has grown over 5x globally in the last two years.  Similarly, we’ve seen an 1251% increase in ad requests on our AdMob display network in the last year.  The usage is not restricted by device types either. The majority of Brazil’s mobile subscribers own feature (WAP) phones, and a lot of the growth we’re seeing is coming from these devices.  However, high end devices such as those running the Android and iOS operating systems are growing quickly as well in terms of both ad requests and unique users.

Application developers are playing a big role in driving Brazil’s fast growth in mobile Internet usage by creating the compelling mobile content that these millions of consumers are engaging with everyday.  Last year, we saw tremendous interest from the local, vibrant developer community when we hosted our largest ever Google Developer Day in Sao Paulo.  Hundreds of Brazilian app developers are using mobile advertising to grow their businesses, such as Best, Cool & Fun Games who saw a tenfold increase in revenue from mobile advertising in 2010.  We are thrilled with this success and are excited to continue helping developers build a business on mobile.

As more Brazilian consumers spend more time on their mobile devices, advertisers need to think about how they should tailor their marketing to reach this growing mobile audience.  Today, advertisers can reach millions of users in Brazil who are searching on Google from their mobile devices.  To connect with these consumers, there are three things that advertisers should focus on when going mobile:

1. Create separate mobile campaigns.  The first step to reaching mobile users is to separate mobile ad campaigns from desktop campaigns - globally we've seen that these campaigns perform better because advertisers have more control over their bids and budgets and can make better use of mobile-specific ad features.
   
   
2. Optimize landing page experience.  Advertisers need to be sure that their landing pages are optimized for mobile. They can do this by either creating a new mobile landing page or making sure their desktop pages render well on the mobile screen.
   
   
3. Don’t forget about feature (WAP) phones.  Much of the growth in 2010 came from mobile users who are searching on feature phones.  Be sure that you are reaching these users by creating WAP mobile search ads for your mobile campaigns.

While we are thrilled about the mobile growth that we saw in 2010, we think that 2011 will be even more impressive for Brazil.  To learn more about our advertising solutions or about how to earn money from mobile advertising, visit www.google.com/mobileads. 

Posted by Peter Fernandez, Mobile Sales Lead for Latin America

Google Boost: now appearing on mobile phones

Back in October we announced Google Boost, a new advertising solution to help local businesses connect with potential customers in their area.  Today we are excited to announce that Boost ads can appear on Google Search results pages on Android and iPhone devices.

Consumers increasingly use mobile devices to search for products and services, and Boost will give advertisers the opportunity to reach these customers exactly when they are looking for local businesses on their phones.  This feature will automatically take effect for current and future Boost advertisers.

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In case you aren’t familiar with Boost, it’s Google's new advertising product that helps business owners quickly create an online advertising campaign that targets local customers.  Using information from the business’s free Google Places listing, Boost automatically suggests and creates text ads that appear on Google Search and Google Maps results pages.

Google Boost is now available in all U.S. cities to select business types.  To find out if your business is eligible, sign in to your Places account (or create a free one if you haven’t yet) and visit the Dashboard.  If Boost is not currently available to your business, fill out this short form and we’ll notify you when it is.

Posted by Kiley McEvoy, Product Manager

Where are the 2 billion daily requests in the AdMob network coming from?

We recently shared data on the explosive growth of the AdMob network last year. In 2010 we saw ad requests quadruple with every region and almost every country in the world contributing to that total growth number. Since then we’ve had a number of requests for a more detailed breakdown of exactly where in the world the growth is coming from. While the AdMob network generates monthly ad requests from more than 190 countries, 17 countries account for more than 80% percent of total traffic in December 2010.

When we looked at the growth by country within the regions in 2010 some interesting trends emerged. Most regions had 2-3 countries that accounted for more than half of total ad requests. The remainder of the requests across these regions were spread across a set of smaller, but generally more rapidly growing countries. Highlights include:

• Three countries - India (26%), South Korea (13%) and Japan (12%) - accounted for just more than half of ad requests from Asia in December 2010. Five countries in Asia - South Korea, Japan, China, Singapore and Thailand - had growth rates of more than 1000% in 2010.
• Two countries - Mexico (31%) and Brazil (26%) - drove more than half the ad requests in Latin America in December 2010. Brazil’s growth in 2010 far outpaced that of any other country in the region at 1251%. 
• Three countries - the UK (33%), France (17%) and Germany (12%) drove more than 60% of ad requests from Western Europe in December 2010. The top 10 countries in Western Europe all experienced a greater than 400% growth rate in 2010. 
• Three countries - Nigeria (21%), South Africa (21%) and Egypt (12%) - accounted for more than half of the ad requests from Africa in December 2010. Sudan experienced the most explosive growth in Africa at 2466%, but started from a small base and only accounted for 6% of African requests in 2010.

For a more detailed look at each region, check out the attached presentation.  Note that this data is based solely on ad requests in the AdMob network of mobile web sites and iPhone, Android, webOS, and Flash Lite applications. 

2011 is poised to be another break-out year for mobile as more consumers become more engaged with Internet content - from mobile sites to applications - on their mobile devices. 

Posted by Harsh Shah, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

Announcing an improved ad preview tool

This post has been cross posted from the Inside AdWords Blog:

The Ad Preview Tool is a handy way to check how your ads appear on Google without accumulating additional impressions or clicks. By setting a specific location for your preview, you can see how your ads will look to a user in New York even if you’re located in San Francisco.

We’ve recently given the Preview Tool a face-lift and introduced some helpful new features. If you’re signed into your account while previewing your ads, you’ll now see integrated keyword diagnosis results. In this example below, we’ve entered our keyword red roses to see if it’s triggering ads in New York:

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In addition to displaying the ads for that search, the Preview Tool now specifically confirms whether your ad is showing and links to the relevant campaign and ad group. If your ad isn’t showing, the Preview Tool will tell you why, helping you understand if you need to adjust your bids, location targeting, daily budget, or optimize your account.

Using the new Device setting, you can also view and diagnose your ads for high-end mobile devices. You can even choose the specific device and carrier you’re interested in, so you can check ad visibility on multiple devices without borrowing all of your friends’ phones!

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This feature is especially relevant if you're using location extensions to target your mobile ad campaign to an area other than your physical location. By entering latitude and longitude information in the Ad Preview Tool, you can quickly confirm that your ads are correctly displaying your business address to mobile users within a specific location. You can also determine whether a hyperlocal distance marker, which lets users know exactly how far away they are from your business, is visible for your ads. 

You can explore these new features by finding the Ad Preview Tool under the Reporting and Tools tab in your AdWords account or by navigating directly to www.google.com/adpreview.

Posted by Kaan Baloglu, Google Mobile Ads Software Engineer

Dating site seeks love-seekers by city location on mobile

In the latter part of last year Lovestruck.com, one of the UK’s leading dating websites on mobile and desktop, came to us with quite a challenge. The location-aware dating site wanted to promote its free iPhone application to users in London, and only in London. We often get asked to run campaigns in one country or on specific handsets, but this was the first time that we had been asked to focus a campaign on one city, in the UK.

The campaign kicked off in May 2010 and ran across our network of mobile websites and iPhone applications.  However, unlike other campaigns, the ads promoting the Lovestruck.com app were only shown to iPhone users in London. To get the app, users simply had to click on the banner ad and they were taken through to the App Store download page for the Lovestruck.com app.

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For Lovestruck.com the key benefit of this geo-targeted approach was that it allowed them to align the campaign with the company's strategy of expanding its membership base in the UK's capital city. But this wasn't the only benefit that Lovestruck.com saw. The campaign generated a far greater return on investment than other nationwide campaigns, as it was able to target potential users more closely.

The campaign exceeded expectations considerably.  Cost per Downloads (CPD) were more than 76 percent lower than expected. This meant that we were able to work with mobile media agency Fetch Media to immediately scale the campaigns, increasing budget by more than 60 percent.

Lovestruck.com was so happy with the results of the campaign that it now spends 40 percent of its marketing budget on mobile, and has rolled out similar geo-targeted campaigns in Singapore and Hong Kong. To download the full Lovestruck case study, please click this link. 

Posted by Matt Brocklehurst, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

Mobile advertising brings extraordinary success to Defender Direct

Defender Direct sells affordable security systems to individuals who want to keep their homes and loved ones safe. To stay ahead of their competition and to ensure client satisfaction, Defender Direct staffed their call centers with consultants educated on the intricacies of their security systems. To drive more calls to their call centers, Defender Direct decided to implement Click-to-call mobile ad campaigns.

Driving calls to the call center is critical to Defender Direct’s business model and a primary goal of their marketing efforts. With this in mind, Defender Direct turned to mobile advertising to generate new, better qualified leads. Google suggested their Click-to-call mobile search ad unit, which prominently highlights the business phone number in the ad result (see example below).

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First, Defender Direct ran a Click-to-call campaign targeted to WAP mobile phones, giving users the option to place a call directly to their call center or visit their mobile site. After this campaign performed exceedingly well, Defender Direct’s next move was to target high-end devices with full Internet browsers including the iPhone and Android platforms. The results were impressive.  ROI for Defender Direct mobile campaigns exceeded the ROI for their desktop campaigns by a factor of two. By running Click-to-call campaigns on both WAP and high end devices, Defender Direct succeeded in driving more qualified leads to their call centers.

With an overwhelming 75-80% of Defender Direct’s online advertising clicks coming from mobile devices, they have now allocated a quarter of their total online advertising budget to this platform. This campaign is an excellent example of how advertisers can take advantage of new opportunities in mobile to successfully reach their business goals in different and unique ways. To learn more about this ad format, please read our Click-to-call Best Practices post.

Posted by Dalia Mitra, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

The Keyword Tool helps you go mobile

This post has been cross posted from the Inside AdWords Blog:

When you’re out and about, is your phone your go-to computer? If you find yourself doing mobile searches for information, directions, or even real-time price comparisons, you’re not alone--mobile search is growing fast. Over the past two years, Google's mobile searches have grown by more than five times. Furthermore, in the third quarter of 2010, Google mobile searches jumped 130% year over year.

Given the growth of mobile search, it’s no surprise that more and more of you are looking to capitalize on the mobile advertising opportunity. If you’re already a mobile advertiser or if you’re looking to make your jump onto the small screen, your job has just gotten easier.

Mobile Statistics in the Keyword Tool

The Keyword Tool now helps you build a better keyword list to target mobile users. Under "Advanced options," you can now search for keywords for devices with mobile WAP browsers, mobile devices with full Internet browsers (think iPhone and Android phones), or all mobile devices (sum of devices with WAP browsers and devices with Internet browsers).

When you do a keyword search, the statistics you see for Competition, Global and Local Monthly Searches, and Local Search Trends are all specific to the device or devices that you’ve selected.

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Let us know what you think of this new feature by clicking the “Send Feedback” link in the Keyword Tool or by going directly to our feedback form.

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew.

AdMob Network hits 2 Billion Requests a Day

Mobile usage continues to explode, and we continue to see rapid growth throughout the AdMob network of mobile sites and applications. What does this mean for mobile advertising? Today we receive more ad requests in a single day than AdMob received for the entire month of December 2007. That’s a magnitude of 30 times in just over three years.

Here are a few quick stats on what’s happening in our network:
* The AdMob network now receives more than 2 billion ad requests per day, more than quadrupling over the last twelve months.
* More than 100 million unique Android and iOS devices requested an ad each month, nearly doubling over the last six months.
* Rapid growth is global. Nine countries in the AdMob network generated more than a billion monthly ad requests in December 2010, up from just one country a year ago.
* The strongest regional growth in monthly ad requests over the past year has come from Asia (564%), Western Europe (471%) and Oceania (363%).




As we kick off 2011, we continue to be excited about the rapid growth of the mobile industry and of mobile advertising. It’s clear that the growth trajectory of the entire mobile industry is just going to continue to get steeper this year, creating big opportunities. Are you ready for mobile in 2011?

Posted by Harsh Shah, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

Click-to-call best practices: useful tips for optimizing your mobile campaigns

This January, we launched a Click-to-call functionality for mobile ads that enables advertisers to directly connect with potential customers over the phone. In less than a year, Click-to-call (CTC) ads have come a long way and hundreds of thousands of advertisers are using the ad format today. In fact, over the past three months we've seen the number of Google advertisers using phone extensions on mobile grow 28% month-over-month, globally. What’s more, Click-to-call ads on both Google Search and Display Networks are generating millions of calls every month on mobile.

We’re excited to see this response to Click-to-call ads and we’re only just getting started! Since the initial launch, we’ve continued to innovate on the CTC platform by developing a variety of new ad formats to help advertisers reach their marketing objectives. In recent studies we found that when compared to ads without phone numbers, Click-to-call ads drive a 6-8% average increase in click-through rates. To help you maximize the power of Click-to-call, we’ve put together the following best practices for our recent CTC enhancements so that you can easily choose the ad format that best fits your campaign goal. Please note that while these ad formats are eligible to show on the Google Display Network, these tips are specific to campaigns that are targeting Google.com and are opted-in to show on high-end devices with full Internet browsers.


Drive calls to a centralized number with Phone Extensions

Whether you are national advertiser with a call center or just want to drive calls to a specific phone number, the Phone Extensions ad format can be a useful tool. Phone Extensions enable you to include a phone number in your mobile ad that will remain the same, regardless of where the ad is showing.  For example, if you have a national 1-800 number, adding it to your Phone Extension will result in the ad displaying that exact number to users located in California and to users located in New York.  Giving customers the option to instantly make contact with you is a great way to drive qualified leads as well as scale your business. To learn more about this ad format, please read the Phone Extensions announcement.


Focus on phone calls with Call-only Creative

Many businesses value phone calls and website visits differently. If you specifically want to connect with your customers over the phone, you can now use the Call-only Creative to create campaigns solely focused on driving calls to your business. An enhancement that works with Phone Extensions, the Call-only Creative ensures that your phone number is the only clickable part of your mobile ad. Since a call costs the same as a click to your ad, you can completely focus on fostering phone interactions with your desired audience via your mobile campaigns. To learn more about this ad format, please read the Call-only Creative announcement.

Measure performance with Call Metrics for Phone Extensions and Call-only Creative

For more insight into the performance of your Phone Extensions and Call-only Creative ads, enable the AdWords Call Metrics feature.  Using a dynamically assigned Google Voice number, Call Metrics provide campaign-level statistics on the number of phone leads generated by your AdWords ads including call duration and caller area code. Currently, Call Metrics is only available to a limited number of US advertisers, but we plan to bring this feature to more advertisers in the coming months. To learn more about Call Metrics, please visit please visit Google Ad Innovations.


Help customers remember your phone number with Vanity Phone Numbers

Do most of your business transactions take place over the phone? If so, including a vanity phone number in your ads can help customers remember how to contact you when they need your products or services. An enhancement to Phone Extensions, Vanity Phone Numbers allow you to display an alphanumeric phone number in your mobile ad. As seen in the image above, instead of using 1-800-836-3464 in their mobile ad, 1-800-VENDING can use their actual business name. To learn more about this ad format, please read the Vanity Phone Numbers announcement.


Reach local customers with Location Extensions

Trying to connect with the on-the-go and ready-to-buy local consumer? Adding a location specific business phone number to your ads can help you effectively engage with this audience. Let’s say you own a chain of pizza restaurants and you want to ensure that customers can instantly reach the pizza place nearest to them. Since Location Extensions ads are served based on a users’ location, hungry patrons will click and call the closest restaurant instead of the one across town. As an additional benefit, this ad format displays your address and business location on an expandable map and can help navigate customers to your store.  For more information about this ad format, please read the Location Extensions announcement.

We hope you’ll find these tips useful and we look forward to developing more Click-to-call features for you in the future.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Google Mobile Ads Product Manager