The Carphone Warehouse harnesses AdWords to propel its mobile marketing

The Carphone Warehouse launched in 1989 as a UK mobile phone retailer and now has a portfolio of thousands of stores across nine European countries, as well as an e-commerce site.

Given the different channels their customers can use to access products, it was a logical choice to connect these channels with a mobile marketing strategy. “Clearly The Carphone Warehouse has a natural position in this new emerging mobile space, and we view it as a key way of driving efficient sales but also fulfilling what we refer to as multi-channel assistance,” says Gareth Jones, their head of online marketing.

Take a look at this short interview with Gareth to find out what The Carphone Warehouse did.

The first step was to build a mobile-optimised website. “Previously if you searched for ‘carphone’ on your mobile, you’d have gone through to the dot-com site. We were selling through that, but that was more to do with the tenacity of the user to pinch, scroll and end up at the checkout.” The mobile site leverages the capabilities of a phone with click-to-call functionality to enable a user to contact the call centre and make a purchase.

Next, they worked closely with their agency Efficient Frontier to build a campaign specifically for mobile, analysing results on a frequent basis to refine their keyword lists. In addition, they included a click-to-call number in their text ads. “Click-to-call is an important element of our paid marketing activity because it’s clearly driving calls that are converting very efficiently for us,” Gareth observes.

They began to explore new AdWords ad formats designed for mobile. Taking advantage of Mobile Ad Sitelinks, which allow an AdWords text ad appearing on a high end mobile device to include two links to a site’s deeper content, The Carphone Warehouse included a link to their store finder page. “That’s a clear multi-channel dynamic. You’re walking down the street, you fancy buying a phone, you need to know where The Carphone Warehouse is and you use your mobile search functionality to do that,” says Gareth. The click-through rate for Mobile Ad Sitelinks was 312% greater than mobile search activity where Sitelinks did not appear.

You can download a PDF version of The Carphone Warehouse case study here.

Posted by Michael Schipper, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

The Carphone Warehouse harnesses AdWords to propel its mobile marketing
Rating: 100% based on 975 ratings. 91 user reviews.