Forecasts and predictions are tools that most marketers cannot seem to get enough of, and just the other day Marin Software, an advertising tools and software company, has released yet another report, as it has been reported by Search Engine Land, that shows us the current state of things, as well as some of their own forecasts for the near future. The company has called their report “The State of Mobile Search Advertising in the World,” and it focuses on things like CPC, paid click and conversions in the mobile advertising that takes place all around the world. The information in their report comes from research based on mobile search campaigns from 13 countries around the world.
In their report, the company makes a prediction about mobile devices that seems completely reasonable. Marin says that by December of this year, mobile devices (which do include tablets in this report) will bring in one third of all paid clicks in the United States in particular. This is quite a significant increase from numbers recorded by the company for December of 2012, which show mobile devices making up about 23.4 percent of paid clicks in mobile search in the United States, which is a result of mobile search accounting for just over 18 percent of search ad dollars in that month of 2012.
As for CPCs, Marin reports that prices increased on mobile devices in December of last year, even more significantly than they did in search for the PC. Also, as could be expected, the company reports that mobile devices saw much higher CTRs for the end of the year, and they were at lower CPCs. But, conversions did not seem to be doing so well for mobile devices, as they were lower.
Marin writes in their summary of their report;
The rapid adoption of smart mobile devices, such as the iPhone and the iPad, is changing how consumers engage with brands and conduct commerce. To show how these consumer trends impact digital advertising, Marin Software analyzed paid-search campaigns across 2000 brands and more than $4 Billion in global paid-search spend.
What is interesting about these numbers is that Google has just revealed their quickly famous Enhanced AdWords Campaigns, which were set out to fix the supposed CPC issues with mobile search. Although Google had a very clear issue occurring with their mobile CPCs, as I recently wrote about, Marin reports an opposite scenario. It is hard to believe that Google was having CPC issues, but overall CPCs for mobile search were doing well.
Either way, Marin’s predictions about mobile’s influences in the search marketing world are cause for excitement, as the shift to mobile becomes even more evident. With Google’s new Enhanced AdWords Campaigns, marketers will be able to easily take advantage of mobile search opportunities, which I can only assume will be a huge deciding factor in the decisions of many marketers to go through with starting mobile search campaigns.
