This year, the percentage of searches conducted on mobile has already exceeded desktop in 10 countries.

Now is the perfect time to optimise your AdWords for mobile. Doing so can increase both traffic and sales, and even save you money.

So what do you need to do to make sure that your Google AdWords campaigns are optimised for mobile? Read on.

1. Create Your Mobile Advertising Strategy and Set Clear Objectives

Before you start making wholesale changes to your AdWords mobile campaigns, it is important that you first clarify what you want your mobile visitors to do when the land on your website. It is vital that you have clear mobile performance KPIs set before you before you begin to invest time and additional money in your mobile advertising.

Are your call to actions as clear and prominent on mobile devices as they are on desktop? Do you encourage them to call you and make it possible to click on a prominent phone number?

Users expect to scroll on mobile, but it is important to also include a quick call to action right at the top of the page to encourage enquiries or sales:

Consider placing call to actions in more prominent locations for mobile traffic

Of course it’s important to measure calls and direct conversions that occur on mobile devices, and we’ll discuss how to do this below. But in addition to this, it’s a good idea to monitor cross device conversions.

A cross device conversion is when a user clicks on your advert using a tablet or smart phone, before converting on a desktop or other device. Through measuring this, you could find out that mobile advertising plays a more important role in generating sales and enquiries than the number of converted clicks volume of sales shown in AdWords suggests.

2. Ad Click to Call Extensions

If your business provides services to customers, it is important to include a click to call phone number in your adverts:

When you add Call Extensions to your account, you can select to use a Google Call Forwarding number and create a conversion to measure calls of a specific duration.

Call forwarding numbers are free and allow you to measure the performance of your adverts and number of calls made from your advertising:

Optimise your AdWords for mobile by adding a Google Call Forwarding number and setting up a conversion to measure the number of phone enquiries made — Settings for adding a Google Call Forwarding number to your campaigns to track the volume of calls generated from your advertising

3. Create Mobile Specific Adverts

When creating adverts within your AdWords account, you have the option to set a device preference. I recommend that you have at least one, if not two, adverts set with a preference for mobile:

AdWords Setting mobile device preferences — Google AdWords – How to set you advert device preference to mobile

This will allow you to test advert layouts for mobile and split test performance between both devices. Adverts on mobile devices perform differently and having separate adverts will allow you to improve the layout of you mobile adverts and performance of your campaigns.

4. Consider the Higher (or Lower) Cost per Conversion or Sale for Mobile Traffic

If your site converts well on desktop, don’t assume that the conversion rate on mobile will be the same.

Check out the performance of your adverts within AdWords and Google Analytics to assess the impact mobile paid traffic has on enquiries and sales compared to desktop or tablet devices.

To view mobile traffic performance in Google Analytics, head to the Acquisition/AdWords section and add a mobile segment. This will enable you to assess whether the cost per sale is higher or lower on mobile:

Google Analytics - How to add a mobile advanced segment to view your Mobile AdWords performance — Google Analytics – How to add a mobile advanced segment to view your Mobile AdWords performance

5. Adjust Pay Per Click Bids for Mobile

Pay attention to the revenue generated from paid mobile traffic and the volume of enquiries generated. If you find that your paid mobile visitors’ average order value is lower than on desktop, or the cost per acquisition is higher, then you can adjust your bids to lower the cost per click to improve your return on investment. This can be done at AdWords campaign level to decrease you bids by a set percentage:

Optimise your AdWords mobile advertising bids to maximise your return on investment — Optimise your AdWords mobile bids to get the best ROI

You can also adjust your PPC bids using the Ad Schedule settings although this effects the bids of desktop, tablet and mobile traffic. Read more about AdWords Bid Adjustments.

Conclusion

The volume of mobile search has reached an all time high, and only looks set to grow. These tips are just some of the areas where you can optimise your AdWords mobile campaigns to improve performance.

Of course, if your site isn’t designed for mobile, then I recommend that you address this before paying for lots of mobile traffic to your site. If you site already looks good on mobile, then pay attention to your landing pages, as well as your adverts, to maximise conversion rates.