Go Mobile! Series: A case study in optimizing mobile campaigns

More and more people are accessing the internet on their mobile devices. Take advantage of this trend by making sure that your ad campaigns are opted in to show on mobile devices with full internet browsers. If you’d like to take things to the next level, create separate mobile-focused campaigns so that you can optimize your keywords, ad text and landing pages for people using mobile devices.

To help you understand what mobile optimization looks like, we thought we'd share the approach that Razorfish, a global digital advertising agency, took for one of their retail clients:

• The Razorfish team started by duplicating the existing desktop campaigns and switching the settings to target mobile devices with full internet browsers.
• Since their client had a well-known brand name, they focused on branded keyword terms with enough traffic to help them learn quickly about what was working best for their campaigns.
• To measure performance, they tracked several conversion metrics including whether a mobile user looked up the brick and mortar store location or downloaded a coupon from the website. Right away, they saw a 7.5% lower cost per conversion on mobile devices, encouraging them to test ways to optimize their mobile campaigns.
• Razorfish tested whether variations in the campaign’s landing page would affect conversion rates. The team hypothesized that mobile users might be looking to take a specific action, and by starting the user’s experience closer to that action, the client would see better results. As it turned out, for this client, they saw much higher conversion rates when the user was directed to a landing page that showed nearby store locations.
• Finally, they tested variations in the ad text. Four versions of ad text were tested, including the original copy used in desktop campaigns. Each of the three new versions provided over 9.3% lift in conversion rate over the strongest performing copy in their desktop campaigns.

We hope you can learn from Razorfish's success and apply some of these strategies to your own mobile campaigns.

To learn more about the approach Razorfish took to optimize their client’s mobile ad campaigns, or read about other case studies, check out our Mobile Ads Success Stories.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew