With mobile consumption increasing year over year, optimizing Google ads for mobile is something important to keep in mind. Given the smaller screen, you have less real estate to make an impression, so remember to be succinct and present your most important information. Let’s start with your optimizing Google ads via text on the search network:
- With reduced text size, your ad description may easily go unnoticed, so put your call-to-action or promotion in the headline, whichever is more applicable. However, this doesn’t mean you can slack off on your description – make sure the wording is easy to understand and that your value proposition pops.
- Add extensions to help your ad capture more real estate on the smaller screen and select the “Mobile” checkbox when creating them.
- If you have a mobile site, be sure to land your ads on that. (This is a site created specifically for mobile, as opposed to a general responsive design.)
- If phone calls are an important KPI for your business, remember to add a call extension and link it to a conversion action so you can enable call reporting. To go a step further, use the respective AdWords code to track phone calls generated after a user clicks through to your site from your search ad and contacts you from your site.
- Consider text message extensions, which provides users an additional way to contact you from your ad. For example, this feature is useful for businesses that require a verbally heavy explanation of their services and some users may prefer to receive that information clearly and fully in text.
Now let’s move on optimizing Google ads on the display network:
- Example ad formats are the 320×50 / 320×100 image ads and responsive ads. Your copy will need to be concise (and precise!) and the visual should ideally be a semi close-up shot of the product, person, etc. because your creative should be more comprehensible than usual since it is being shown in a reduced size.
- Mobile display ads can appear on sites using contextual keyword targeting, topic (content) targeting, retargeting and placements. With retargeting and placements, which allows advertising on sites and apps, think of what your customers’ mobile behavior is like – e.g. what kind of sites that are more suited for mobile browsing are they visiting often? What app categories are popular amongst your customers?
Hopefully, these tips will help you in optimizing Google ads and making the most of smaller mobile screens.