Mobile has finally become big, after many years of people saying “next year mobile will be huge” it finally is, mobile phones are accounting for a growing percentage of sales that can be tracked as well as much pre-sales research that people aren’t tracking on their sites. According to a survey by EPIsSever 33% of smartphone users have made a purchase via their mobile, a further 26% had bought something online using an app so in the context of the UK alone having over 75 million mobile phones in use (source) mobile cannot be ignored and should figure as a factor in your AdWords campaign as well as a web design considerations to !

One surprising factor is that different mobile platforms deliver different sales conversion figures and Average Order Values too so it’s worth knowing how they perform on your products/services, stats indicate that around 10% of site visits are from mobile devices, although for more premium brands it’s nearer 15%, over 80% of mobile visits are from Apple devices although basket values vary by device.

Speaking of Apple, the iPad delivers conversion rates twice as high as desktop computers, from a dataset collected by Affiliate Window and Buy.at of 81.9 million visits to retailer sites in their portfolio’s 1.57 millions sales were generated and the following average order value and mobile platform stats noted :

As you can see from the stats, Apple leads the field in average order value, the iPhone does well and even breaks out above the AOV for non mobile devices, with the iPad coming out on top of all mobile devices (more than double the AOV of BlackBerry) and even comes out with a higher than average non mobile order value, various conclusions can be drawn from this such as iPad owners have higher disposable income/spend more or it’s just easier to use the iPad to research and shop as it’s more of a recreational item than a work machine etc.

Regardless of your thoughts on mobile it’s a channel that can’t be ignored, Google AdWords is catering for it on pay per click with their new targeting options available to AdWords mobile advertisers, Advertisers are already able to run separate campaigns that target tablet devices or specific mobile phone carriers and now they are rolling out Wi-Fi targeting so you can send those users on Wi-Fi to a different page/serve different content to other users who may be on a faster connection etc.

In addition to Wi-Fi targeting advertisers can now also target AdWords by Operating System and thus tailor content to specific users based upon whether they are using Apple IOS, Android, WebOS etc.
More details here

The uses of this additional targeting in your PPC Management strategy might not be immediately apparent for some advertisers but over time as the mobile sector develops more granular targeting can only aid advertisers to improve their ROI and strip out lower performing areas thus freeing up budget for areas that are working.

With regard to mobile, at the very least you should check your site across a range of mobile devices and ensure that it’s rendering properly and the navigation and contact options work and of course the basket and payment system if you sell products on your site, Currently around 10% of visits are made by mobile users which doesn’t sound like much but that’s the equivalent of over one month worth of visitors per year that you need to cater for to ensure maximum conversions are achieved.