Mobile Makes Search Inroads

A recent study by Performics found that mobile paid search is now 11 percent of mobile impressions and that tablets provide 13 percent of that total. Despite the popularity of mobile browsing, marketing budgets specifically dedicated to mobile trail that of online and social media, but that is simply part of the industry’s natural growing pains.

“I don’t see mobile being any different than any other of the evolutionary lags,” said Daina Middleton, CEO of Performics, which is part of Publicis Groupe. “Originally there was a lag to “being online” (by brands). There was a lag to social, now we have a lag to mobile. Brands have been doing the same thing for 60 years and old habits are hard to break. All of the tools that we use, the way we measure is based on the old broadcasting model.”

That evolution of mobile, according to Middleton, means that leading brands are missing opportunities by not looking at mobile as an integral part of both brand discovery and ecommerce. “We had a leading brand, one of our clients, find that 12 percent of their sales were coming from mobile, even though their site wasn’t optimized for mobile purchasing,” said Middleton. “They are now saying, ‘maybe I should optimize for mobile first, rather than mobile second, and that is a huge mind shift.”
The Performics study also found that mobile and tablet devices have been tied with CTR on computers over the last year and that tablet activity is heavily weighted towards display, with “virtually no clicks coming from search partners.” Most clicks occurred through Google search.

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