How To Get The Lowest Google Ads CPC On Mobile (Hint: Improve Your Mobile Quality Score)

Internet traffic is undeniably shifting towards mobile phones. As a digital marketer, it is imperative to tailor strategies towards this shift in how we use the internet. Since running paid search or paid social campaigns on mobile can differ significantly from running them on desktops, it seems like a no-brainer to start learning exactly how mobile paid campaigns can differ, and how to optimize campaigns based on these differences.

Learning and applying strategies that take into account these variations in mobile strategy can be the difference between survival and death in terms of a digital marketer’s value.

1. Why Should You Focus On Mobile Paid Search Strategy?

As reported by Merkle in the Digital Marketing Report, the second quarter of paid search ad spend showed that mobile ads were responsible for 60% of ad clicks. Prognosticators of mobile search ads overtaking desktop ads have been validated over time.

If you take time to look up from your phone in a crowded area, you’ll probably see the majority of those around you looking down at their phones. Mobile phones are dominating humans’ attention.

Via Huffington Post

All of this is to say that when searching the internet these days, most people are using their phones, and forecasters are predicting a continuation of this trend for the foreseeable future. Long story short, if you’re a digital marketer without a clear mobile strategy, you’re about to be left in the dust.

Via Mobify

If you hope to bring any value to your client or supervisor in the digital marketing sphere, it is necessary to know the ins and outs of mobile paid search optimization and best practice strategies.

2. Responsive Site

By now, most companies have created responsive websites or mobile-friendly websites. Regardless of whether you’re running paid ads, this is one of the first steps an organization needs to take in order to enter the mobile future with a viable website.

Via Google

If you haven’t already made your website mobile-friendly or responsive, the good news is that web developers and DIY platforms like WordPress have made it very easy to make tweaks to your site to fulfill the requirements of ‘mobile-friendly’.

Google’s definition of a mobile-friendly site is useful, because they are the biggest search platform and often grade websites based on their mobile-friendliness. Indeed, Google’s coveted search rankings will start to consider mobile site speed. This is one of the clearest signs of how important changing your site to a mobile-friendly one is for the very near future.

Other guidance on what Google constitutes ‘mobile-friendly’ depends on your business goals, but can include:

• Ease of navigation
• Ease of engagement or ability to take action
• Simplified site menus
• Consistent experiences across different devices
• Limited need for scrolling and zooming
• Simplified forms
• Limited distractions

The most important thing is just to make your site responsive; Google even says as much. The time is now. Pay heed to Google’s guidance on mobile friendly.

3. Site Speed

This is a big one. As mentioned, site speed is one of Google’s top organic ranking factors now. It makes sense, considering humans’ declining attention spans.

Via Ad Espresso

Considering the trends on attention span, it wouldn’t be a leap to assume these numbers will only get worse. Yikes!

Google even has a tool to help you measure site speed. You should use it often.

So, how can you get your site to load faster? One way is to keep it simple and lightweight. Pretty easy, right? Here are a few images to share with your webmaster. Even if you don’t understand how to make a site lightweight, the idea makes sense. Less code, less stuff.

Lightweight site code Via Neil Patel

Lightweight v. Not-Lightweight Via Neil Patel

4. Landing Page Design

On mobile you don’t have as much space, so you have to be more concise with your messaging.

When you compare mobile and desktop conversions, if mobile is lagging in performance, it could be because of the mobile landing page experience.

Via Neil Patel

One could get into a lot of rules and regulations on how to improve mobile landing page design, but a good rule to follow is just to ‘keep it simple, stupid’. The above example has a headline, a relevant and high-quality image, and a button with CTA.

While keeping it simple can be subjective, it is easily recognizable when seen, as in the example above.

For instance, use a single CTA to impel the user to take action with as little friction as possible. More CTAs can confuse the user.

Also, make the CTA button pretty big, or even fill the whole width of the screen if you can.

Via Neil Patel

There are many other best practices for mobile landing pages that coincide with these principles. You don’t need to adhere to each one, but the rules combined speak to a principle that can guide minimalist and simplistic landing page design.

As we mentioned previously, making your landing page lightweight and agile allows for fast loading, because speed matters. All of these ideas on keeping things simple are related to each other. You simply don’t have as much space and resources to work with on a mobile phone. A mobile phone is smaller than a desktop, and the CPU and screen of a mobile phone are smaller as well.

Via Tenor

It sounds pretty basic. But, if you keep to this fundamental principle, then you’re ‘winning half the battle’, as they say. Keep your landing page messaging concise and to the point. Quick headlines that get to the point are gold. Use large font and large buttons whenever possible, and use as few form fields as you can.

You get the idea. Each business and product offering is different, so versions of a simple landing page can vary, but as long as you stay true to the minimalist aphorism, you should be okay.

5. Compress Or Reduce Images

Images take up lots of memory and require lots of resources to load, so it makes sense to start with this aspect of your website in optimizing for mobile.

Indeed, when running a PPC advertising campaign, if loading a landing page fast is your mission, images can slow your site down – especially if you’re not compressing the images appropriately.

Compressing images is just one option in your mobile strategy. You can also use smaller images, reduce the number of images, or use different image formats.

Via Search Engine Watch

6. Flat Site Architecture

Designing your site to have less deeply embedded and linked content can save your website resources when it is trying to load. This is the idea behind a flat site architecture, as opposed to a deep hierarchy architecture.

Via nngroup.com

Content is more discoverable with flat site architecture – which coincides with the lower attention span era we’re in combined with smaller screens and less computing power.

In addition, categories that are narrow and don’t overlap require less of your attention span to understand. Whereas if you have to keep searching deeper through many levels, you can get distracted or lose the will to continue the search for information.

If you can simplify the categories in your business to be conducive to a more flat site architecture, content will not only be easier to access and to understand, but your website will most likely load faster due to the lightweight principle.

7. Mobile-First Index

In the dinosaur days of the internet, desktop was king. And why not? Most people spent the majority of their time browsing the internet on desktops. It made sense for search engines like Google to scan and archive your desktop site over a mobile site, if they even archived your mobile site.

However, as we discussed earlier, mobile is king now. It only makes sense that Google has changed their algorithm.

Via Word Tracker

In some of the biggest digital marketing news of 2018, Google will start to index your mobile site first, and then your desktop site.

This change in Google’s algorithm is a wake-up call to to any late PPC stragglers to the mobile era who prioritize desktop ads when running campaigns.

Campaigns with desktop in mind as a default priority can have confusing navigation, slow site load times, and page elements that scale improperly on mobile devices.

While Google indexing mobile sites first is primarily an SEO concern, it speaks volumes to the mindset PPC professionals need to take when planning and executing online marketing campaigns.

8. Mobile-Friendly WordPress Plugins

Over half of business websites are built on WordPress, and one of the coolest and most practical advantages of using WordPress are the many plugins available to customize and update your website.

Take advantage to use these plugins to update your own WordPress website to be more mobile efficient. Plugins like WPSmush will automatically compress images uploaded to your media library,

Mobile App can instantly convert your site into a mobile app or a mobile website. The market has dictated that mobile is king, so it will continue to be flooded with apps and tools to help marketers better succeed. You only have to search for the tools.

9. Click-To-Call

If phone calls are a valuable conversion for your business, it is a no-brainer to create click-to-call ad campaigns. Whether you’re a B2B business that needs extra time on the phone to chat with a user, or you’re a brick and mortar store that potential customers are searching on the road, click-to-call campaigns will drive more business.

One statistic claims that 70% of purchases happen within 5 hours of a mobile search. There are tons of stats like these that have somewhat dubious roots, but the premise is clear: mobile phones are valuable for the entire consumer decision journey these days.

Via Search Engine Land

If you’re already using call extensions in your campaigns, you must use the same number that you’re using for those extensions. Also, as you’ll see in the next section, if you can use local numbers, it will help improve performance.

10. Local Search

Calling out the location of a mobile user in ad copy can work especially well because of the relevance of the messaging to the user. The more ways you can relate to a user, the more likely a user is to respond to your message.

Via Search Engine Land

Think and research the mindsets of users searching certain keywords near your store. What are they looking for? What are their pain points? How are you uniquely positioned to solve their problem?

11. Ad Copy

If you’re making a click-to-call ad, make sure your goals and messaging are aligned.

Via Search Engine Land

Speak to the mobile experience. Use phrases like:

• Buy from your phone
• Purchase from mobile
• Mobile purchasing
• Get a quote from your phone

Mention coupons, sales, discounts, special offers, and pricing. Get to the point. Use short headlines instead of keyword loaded descriptions. You have only a short amount of time to capture the user’s attention.

Take more risks with emotional ads and super engaging ad copy to stand out.

Finally, while the best way to set up campaigns is to segment out the mobile campaigns separately, there are options for those of you who aren’t quite ready to isolate mobile campaigns just yet. You can create mobile preferred ads that will show a different and specific type of ad for mobile users.

12. Ad Extensions

Digital marketers should be using as many ad extensions as possible. Indeed, Google has spoken about the benefits of ad extensions that can improve expected CTR – which is a major component of Quality Score.

Call and location extensions are especially important for mobile, even though its important to use as many extensions as you can.

Message extensions are a unique way to interact with your customer. These are a relatively new way to interact with users, and present a unique opportunity to be creative in the ways you can engage users.

Perhaps you prompt the user to message your business for a coupon or discount to be used within a certain time frame. Or maybe you can initiate a conversation and ask a question on a topic that the user could be contemplating. If you’re a travel agency, for example, you could ask the user where they would like to travel.

While these conversations might not always lead to a conversion, you’ll want to find avenues for interaction that can be measured so you can decide if a campaign was successful or not. Afterwards, you can see how you can improve the performance.

13. Ad Customizers Or IF Functions

Speaking to mobile users as a specific audience can be made easier using tools like ad customizers and IF functions.

With ad customizers, you can call out that a user is on their mobile phone and prompt them to take a mobile-specific action. You can also call out the location the user is searching from because you are super granular with your location targeting – like a savvy PPC marketer should be.

You can also use the IF function to call out mobile phone users to take advantage of mobile-only sales opportunities.

You can also apply the IF function to audiences that happen to be using mobile to be even more granular about a particular audience you could be targeting on mobile. While these strategies by themselves won’t move the needle a lot, as traffic increasingly shifts to mobile, you’ll be seasoned and ready for even more inevitable mobile targeting advances when they come.

14. Ad Position Matters More

You need to be more diligent in meeting Google’s Quality Score criteria, which helps you rank higher for lower bids because only the top 2 ad positions really matter for mobile and its really hard to rank that high.

Via Adpearance

As you can see, if you’re a local brick and mortar location, it is absolutely imperative to be ranking on mobile for all the relevant search terms. Furthermore, the options available (store location directions or phone calls) means that a user near the bottom of the funnel will have great options to converting right away. Being in the right place at the right time has never been more important – and mobile strategy is a big part of that.

15. Keywords

Because it is so hard to rank high, you’ll have to be choosy with your keyword research. You have to not only find the keywords with the right intent, but also choose keywords that fit your budget. Ranking in the top two positions for certain words can be price prohibitive due to the increased competition these days.

Mobile users can be action-oriented and further down the sales funnel than the average user. However, the shift in mobile search from desktop in general will naturally bring more research-oriented searches to mobile devices. So there is a balance for which digital marketers need to prepare.

Indeed, mobile users have historically used mobile to research first and buy on desktop or tablet later.

Long story short, you can’t generalize mobile web activity, because ‘mobile activity’ is becoming ‘web activity’.

16. Mobile Only Campaign Settings

Because mobile performance and experience can be so unique, you’ll want to create mobile specific ad campaigns to test different techniques and to measure what works and what doesn’t.

Via Ad Espresso

You can also sort by operating system and device models, which can dictate how ads appear and can help you get really granular with the mobile experience.

You can set budgets by device. Additionally, geotargeting and ad scheduling for mobile-specific campaigns can come in handy for brick and mortar locations that take advantage of ads to coincide with call center or store hours and targeting close to store locations.

Via Ad Espresso

Finally, you can make bid adjustments based on the different return on ad spend (ROAS) that can be unique to mobile ad campaigns.

Segmentation, as PPC advertisers know, is crucial to campaign success. Separating your mobile campaigns so that you can focus on the idiosyncrasies of mobile users and their experiences is a must.

17. Reporting

Use real-time voice analytics solutions, like Invoca. With the new ways for phone calls – and even voice search – to continue to innovate the mobile search space, new reporting tools and metrics will inevitably rock the digital marketer’s most tried and true frameworks. Be able to adjust and be knowledgeable on the new tools to help measure the effectiveness of different mobile strategies.

Whether you implement call tracking and measure call duration or other aspects of the quality of phone calls, measures for success are necessary to improve all campaigns.

In-store conversions tracking (for when users search for nearby store locations) will soon become more important than ever. While the methods and technology for measuring these successes aren’t perfect yet, start testing out different things now to see what may work for your business.

18. Attribution Modeling

Speaking of imperfect digital marketing measurement tools…

The elephant in the digital marketing room is cross device attribution and knowing how to act on it. While we’ve been talking about matching users that jump from desktop to mobile and back, there is no definitive solution on how to credit campaigns or devices for conversions.

Via Search Engine Land

The illustration above shows how users switch their research from mobile to desktop often, and the importance of cross device attribution and tracking. However, user deactivation of cookies can hinder tracking.

While there certainly are problems with attributing credit for conversions, digital marketers need to start experimenting with different models now.

Via Search Engine Land

The problem with Google’s approach is multi-fold. The unique variations in conversion paths make is so that there are too many permutations to narrow down an attribution model to each business. Sure, many models can apply to many businesses, but not all models will cover all the unique ways conversions are captured.

The key is to focus on your business and understand how YOU acquire conversions so that you can create your own working model of what works. You can then apply the credit based on what is happening in your online customer’s journey.

On top of the reality that no model can mimic each business’ unique customer journey, Google’s attribution modeling – and really, no company’s attribution model – has successfully integrated other digital marketing channels, like email marketing and social media, into their attribution modeling process.

19. Smart Bidding

We’ve already talked about separate mobile campaigns and the unique characteristics of mobile performance. Tying it together is figuring out the metrics of your mobile performing campaigns and applying Google’s bidding algorithms to automate your bidding process.

Use smart bidding to take into account various factors, such as device, location, and other factors that Google recognizes as being able to increase the likelihood of conversions. While you can calculate the performance of mobile campaigns and impose a specific ROAS, CPA, or bid adjustment, only Google can look at its own data in real time and take into account all the different variables that aren’t visible to a digital marketer.

While smart bidding might not be the end-all-be-all, free from any conflict of interest (Google is, after all, taking your money), it’s worth it to test these new tools so you can be familiar with their performance – any possibly benefit from improved performance.

20. Mobile Optimized Content

For digital advertisers, using the content to call out the specific mobile aspects of a user’s mobile experience in the ad or landing page copy can improve performance. Test ad copy that calls out your proximity to the user’s location – especially if their searches have high buyer intent.

Focus on ‘shipping’ and ‘delivery’, depending on its relevance to your offering.

Put yourself in the shoes of your potential customer. No rule is hard an fast for all businesses, but if you’re keeping in mind the mobile aspect, you’ll be surprised at the innovative strategies that you can come up with to take advantage of a user being on their mobile phone.

You can also not assume anything; rather, take time to talk to actual customers and research the user experience from those that have converted or interacted positively with your business. Gain insights – not only from quantitative, but also qualitative data – to inform your strategy.

A Final Word

Mobile internet traffic and ad strategy is here to stay. Indeed, there may be a world where mobile devices become so powerful that desktops become obsolete. As digital marketers, we need to be at the forefront of marketing, and frankly, if you haven’t implemented a mobile strategy yet, you’re simply late. However, it is never too late to change, and the tools and ideas that you can apply are better understood than ever.