Search Marketing Sage

Despite all the bad stuff happening this week with Hurricane Sandy (the Search Mojo Charlottesville office was closed down Monday and Tuesday, but thankfully we made it through unscathed), we’re determined to have a happy Halloween – and if you’re affected by Sandy, we hope we can make your Halloween a little happier, too!

The Search Mojo staff has dressed up in their most creative search/social media-related Halloween costumes (and they’ve really outdone themselves this year!). Vote for your favorite costume on Facebook until 2:00pm today. Here’s a review of all the entries:

If your business is interested in capitalizing on local efforts, be sure you not only have your strategy all worked out offline, but online as well. There are a few simple things you could be doing that could revolutionize your business, locally speaking. In a world where mobile phones and local searches are so prevalent (for some perspective, 5.1 Billion people own cell phones, while only 4.2 Billion own a toothbrush! (Source: Mobile Marketing Association Asia)), search engines have adapted for this trend and where you are located has a big impact on the search engine results nowadays.

Here are some steps you could be taking to improve your local visibility, capitalizing on those searchers who could be choosing your competitors over you.

In his presentation “Keys to Leveraging the Mobile Ad Opportunity”, Bill Dinan presented compelling data about the opportunity that mobile advertising presents to marketers. He posed the analogy “desktop is to search as mobile is to act”, implying that by advertising on mobile, marketers can take advantage of the unique research patterns and motivations of mobile searchers.  Dinan stated that 70-85% of all local searches lead to action, usually within a couple hours.

With the constant rise in mobile usage, everyone is scrambling these days to work up a mobile version of their website. While it seems like a wonderful idea, some companies are having a hard time getting them up and running.  There are so many options in how to go about creating your mobile site, and when you finally make a decision, you run into the issue of how to optimize it. Yes people can view a nice mobile-friendly version of your site, but can they find it through search? How is Google treating it? Is it negatively affecting your main site? What do you do?

I’ve written before about how most Google AdWords advertisers who use the Display Network on mobile devices usually have no idea that their ads are showing on mobile apps.  The problem with that from my perspective is that if you are using keywords to contextually trigger your display ads you are relying on those words to keep their ad serving targeted.  Google says that it uses keyword context to trigger those ads, but all the evidence indicates otherwise.

• What is the keyword context that would make an ad for Toyota.com show on Angry Birds?  Shouldn’t all the ads be for bird seed instead?
• Why would a realtor’s ad show on Pandora for the song Primary, by the Cure?  Shouldn’t there be ads for medicine?
• Why would an ad for Charmin Toilet Paper be on my Advanced Task Killer?  Is it because it “wipes” out Apps on your phone you aren’t using at that time?

My personal opinion is that when advertisers use keyword context on Display Ads triggered on mobile apps the context that really matters to Google is how high your AdGroup’s default bid is and keywords don’t come into the equation at all.

So I was very interested in Google’s recent news that they now have Display Network targeting to just advertise on mobile apps only including the AdMob Network which Google bought two years ago for $750 Million.