I was talking to Lehmbeck about mobile search trends and what kinds of consumer response he was seeing to various campaigns. Lehmbeck gave me some unpublished, internal data that I’m now sharing in this post. He said that mobile paid search “looks like much like search advertising did in 2001.”

15 to 25 Percent Mobile Paid Search Traffic

Between 15 percent and 25 percent of paid search traffic is now coming from mobile devices according to Lehmbeck. He adds however, “In local-heavy categories, such as dining, auto services and entertainment this number jumps to 50 percent or more.” He says that with the rise of smartphones “consumer engagement [with mobile search] has gone through the roof.”

Lehmbeck points out that online-only retailers are also starting to use mobile to nab in-store shoppers. “As mobile queries grow and these brands start to create highly optimized mobile experiences, this trend will only continue.” Lehmbeck told me that traffic to e-commerce sites via mobile is somewhat lower than the average (5 percent to 15 percent) but that some e-commerce sellers are seeing a “great ROAS” (return on ad spent).

Much “More Attuned to Location” in Ad Copy

Mobile consumers are “much more attuned to location in ad copy” than online search users according to Lehmbeck. “When a user searches with implied local intent, ads that leverage geographic indication tend to perform better.” Searches like “garden supplies” or “furniture store” are in this category.

Explained Lehmbeck, “We have seen some very strong results for ads that reference location or local offers, especially those that do it in an intelligent way (e.g. “Your Garden Superstore – Take 20% Off in Our Los Angeles Locations This Weekend” or “Locate Your New Sofa – Over 15 Furniture Galleries in Los Angeles to Serve You”).” These ads see 50 percent greater engagement than ads do not indicate where to buy or what specific offers are available in their area.”

Offline Conversions Boost Sales 5 to 10X

I’ve written in the past about the offline impact of paid search. It’s rarely tracked and so the true ROI of many campaigns is probably quite a bit higher than what is being calculated. Lehmbeck told me, “In some rare but very interesting cases [paid search marketers] are tracking it down to the offer level in conjunction with our platform and they have seen 5 – 10X sales when accounting for in-store conversions.”

Lembeck counsels marketers to “build out better mobile experiences and get a deeper sense of what the right metrics are for understanding the true ROI of mobile ad spend.” Indeed, recent data from Marin Software showed higher CTRs for smartphones but much lower conversions than for PC search campaigns. However that’s likely because mobile search conversions weren’t being tracked offline.

DataPop CEO Jason Lehmbeck will be presenting on the iConvert panel at SMX Advanced in Seattle next month.

There isn’t a need to tie promotional activities back to branding metrics, or tricky-to-quantify engagement on the site (“Do we want more page views, or do less views mean the site delivered on the first try?”)

Thanks to that clarity, store owners keep a close eye on their data, and have probably seen mobile devices show-up on their radar a lot more than they used to. Combine that with the buzz around smartphones, and the idea of a store app quickly becomes a topic at the conference room table.

And rightly so. Smartphone users are a highly motivated crowd, and for the time being they represent an audience that is somewhat more upscale. But a smartphone can’t deliver more than the eye can absorb on a 3-4 inch screen, so usability becomes a paramount concern.

Hence the appeal of an app: nothing delivers content with the ease of use and instant response that a native app can provide.

Apps Drive Sales, But What Drives Downloads?

So an app becomes the centerpiece of your new mobile marketing strategy. But is it the whole strategy? To have your app make a dent in sales, you need to get it into people’s hands. There are lots of ways to accomplish that, but simply making a great app and releasing it in the App Store won’t do the trick.

And so it’s time to go back to your metrics – they may be trying to tell you something. Are your new customers coming from search? And is that activity centered around product searches – items you stock that they want? For many store owners, the answer to both questions is yes.

If that’s the case, then you have a great channel for promoting your app, staring you in the face: a mobile-optimized website.

For a lot of companies, having an app and a mobile site might seem like an unnecessary duplication of effort. But when you look at customer acquisition, you can see the value of having your site become a more effective tool for getting first time customers to 1) buy from their phone and 2) download your app for that second purchase.

Or even for the first purchase: if you show customers know that you have a product in stock, plus other products they may be interested in, the positive experience may persuade them to download right now.

Keeping Your Mobile Website Focused

How do we produce a cost-effective mobile site when dollars are already being spent to develop an app? The key here is to focus on the mission at hand: acquiring customers through product search.

Again, back to your metrics: your incoming traffic is probably driven by a handful of top products. So the process of building a mobile store doesn’t have to be a heroic effort to replicate your 1o,000 SKU inventory. Focus on the top 100 products, and use mobile SEO to make those pages perform well in searches for those product names.

Key Features For Mobile SEO

• Mention the product name in your HTML page titles (as you probably do on your desktop website.) But keep it short: Google Mobile only gives you 55 characters to work with (versus 70 for desktop.)
• Re-process your product images to get the files down to the smallest possible size. 50kb JPEGS are an attainable goal if you’re careful with the compression. Google looks at download speed, and factors it into search results.
• Conversely, resist the urge to downsize your product copy. Try to package it as bulleted lists to make it more digestible on a small screen. But don’t leave out details that contains keywords that your customers might use.

Image compression software can help optimize your site for mobile SEO, producing high-quality images that download quickly.

Then decide what the next step should be. Should “Buy Now” be your call-to-action? Should it be “Download Our App”? Or maybe a button for each?

A-B testing will provide the best answer for your particular audience. Either way, you’ve got that mobile user in your store, looking at your inventory, and getting to know you – probably for the first time.

With a coordinated strategy in place, your mobile website can help drive new buyers to download your app, increasing its reach and building a mobile customer base that will come back again and again.

Mobile marketing must seem that way to a lot of companies, and as a result, far too many of them are sitting on the sidelines. Fortunately, there are a few vendors out there offering a shortcut to the mobile Web:  a turnkey publishing platform that allows a marketer to quickly deploy mobile landing pages.

The question is: how effective are these pages in the context of mobile search?

The Case For Mobile Landing Pages

Turnkey landing pages are usually considered because of special circumstance:

• Budget. When most dollars get spent to support desktop sites, the remainder may not actually be enough to support a full-blown mobile effort.
• Direct response campaigns. Sometimes a media campaign concept drives the need for mobile landing pages to catch the resulting traffic. QR codes at trade show booths, mobile offers sent via text, and even plain-old PPC ads can drive the need for a quickly-built mobile site.

The systems available to deploy mobile landing pages change every month. So rather than single-out a single platform and dissect its features, let’s look at the factors you’ll want to keep in mind when evaluating and using these services.

Laying A Foundation

The first thing you’ll want to investigate is whether or not these landing pages can be read by a search engine. Here are a few features to look at closely:

• Dynamic Pages. Some turnkey systems use dynamic pages to quickly create pages that can respond to campaigns or even individual ads. Dynamic pages include lots of parameters in their URLs, and can cause problems for mobile search, just as they do in the desktop world.
• On-Page Coding. Mobile landing pages sometimes use special coding to create a seamless app-like experience. I’ve talked about JQuery Mobile in the past, and there are other frameworks such as XUI, JQTouch, not to mention plain-vanilla JavaScript. These schemes don’t get a 100% thumbs-up or thumbs-down – it depends on how they are used. The key is to ensure that your landing pages are actually composed of distinct pages, instead of a single downloadable page with a chameleon-like ability to alter its content.
• Navigation. If your turnkey site is built to catch campaign traffic, it may just be a collection of free-standing landing pages, with links to connect them to each other. If that’s the case, you won’t benefit from the SEO support these pages would lend to each other. Furthermore, without nav links, you may lose a connection back to the home page, which typically has the strongest SEO scoring.
• Flash. Flash is not usually employed on these sites (thank you Steve Jobs) so that’s one less thing to worry about.

Getting There From Here

Looking at all the points above, you might get the impression that optimizing your mobile landing pages will be an end in itself. And it partially is: you’ll be living with them for a while, so it’s worthwhile to see what sort of SEO performance can be extracted from it.

But you can also take a broader view. If the turnkey site and its campaigns are successful, it’s likely that more mobile projects will follow, including the creation of a more comprehensive “official” mobile website.

With that in mind, your turnkey site can be considered a precursor, one that can be used to lay a foundation for the construction of a future brand presence.

A bit of preparation can help to make that happen:

• Domain Name.  Try to anticipate the URL that will be used for your future mobile site. If you can start using that URL today, you’ll create a footprint that will help search engines discover your next website more quickly. Conversely, you should talk to your vendor if they suggest a URL based on *their* domain name, because you may lose access to it when you transition to your next mobile website.
• Recyclable URLs. What works at the site level also works at the page level. Choosing locations for landing pages that will echo the page locations of a future website will also help smooth the transition. Granted, it’s hard to predict what your future site will look like, but for basic pages like “About Us” or pages promoting on your bread-and-butter product lines, some predictions can be made.

Your short-term mobile landing pages (left) may not have as much content as your future mobile website (right.) But the more they resemble each other in structure, the better your mobile SEO will be down the road.

Altogether, mobile landing pages are a great tactic for getting yourself into the mobile space. And with advance planning, that short-term success can be leveraged into an asset that can feed into successive projects, creating a win-win for both mobile search and your time-to-market.

Marin also estimates that nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of “Google’s US paid-search spend [by December 2012] will come from mobile campaigns.” These are remarkable statements, and it means that Google will be seeing billions in mobile revenue accordingly.

The report incorporates a financial industry (Cowen and Company) projection of Google’s mobile reviews through 2016. While financial forecasts such as this can be notoriously off the mark, mobile will undoubtedly be a massive driver of ad revenue growth for Google over the next several years at least.

Tablets also figure prominently in the future of mobile paid search. Marin reported that at the end of last year tablets accounted for 38 percent of all mobile paid clicks, growing to an estimated 45 percent by the end of this year.

Marin offers some general advice regarding how to allocate budgets in a fragmenting paid search universe: “In the absence of more precise data, the fraction of clicks from tablets versus total mobile clicks is a good proxy for the percent of search budget to allocate towards tablets.” Specific verticals (e.g., retail) may need to pay more attention to tablets than others.

Marin’s client data show that CPCs were lower on mobile devices and CTRs were higher. However mobile conversions were not as strong.

It’s quite possible, as Marin suggests by implication, that mobile conversion data appear the way they do because tracking from smartphones is incomplete. Indeed, a great many conversions driven by mobile search ads may come over the phone or in physical stores — where 95 percent of all conversions actually happen:

Mobile searches often result in conversions that happen via a call or a physical store. Unfortunately, most marketers lack the ability to glue these clicks together into a unified conversion funnel. Marketers should look to estimate their mobile-influenced revenue through the use of popular mobile ad formats such as click-to-call and store-locator. By combining the typical conversion rate for in-store and phone-based transactions with the average revenue per transaction, marketers can estimate a revenue per click for mobile devices, and adjust their mobile CPCs and budget accordingly.

The report includes best practices advice about mobile creative and bidding. In addition, there’s data on international mobile search trends.

Reflecting the growing importance of mobile to search marketers, SMX Advanced in June will feature three mobile sessions covering mobile SEO, mobile SEM and generating and tracking mobile conversions.

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

But when I added the word “Apple” to the headline, it completely changed its dynamics — just like Apple does every time it enters a new business area.

So, I must be talking about Siri right? Wrong. I agree actually that Siri is a really important development, but Apple has much more up its sleeve than just Siri.

What Does Apple Have Up Its Sleeve?

On the 23rd of February, Techcrunch followed by the Financial Times reported that Apple had paid $50 million to acquire a start-up called “Chomp”, whose homepage is shown below.

Chomp is an app search engine where you can find apps using keyword search. Intriguingly, it covers both iPhone and iPad along with Android.

Chomp Is The New Global Search Engine Due To Launch Soon

The image below shows how Chomp currently presents listings (that’s rankings right?) for apps giving you their ratings and clearly identifying if they are free are not.

The team which created Chomp is already working at Apple on the company’s plan to replace the current “App Stores” with Chomp or a version of it.

Chomp Shows Apps Trending In Popularity And Algorithmically Selects Categories

A little testing of Chomp reveals that it is a little more sensitive to keywords than the App Stores themselves – but much needs to be done. Don’t forget, there are now well over half a billion apps which have been downloaded over 25 billion times.

For “apps” read “websites” and for listings read “rankings”, this is big world search and its happening all over again. The app world is now bigger than Google was in the year 2000 when Google had indexed one billion pages — since an app typically has several “pages”.

“Expect To Be Penalized For Abusing Our Rankings!”

Apple is already releasing warnings to app developers saying, “You should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership.”

That is such an uncanny parallel of warnings which Google gave to users of analysis and positioning software in the early years including that they would have their websites de-indexed.

Search For Apps By Keyword

Although Chomp’s multilingual capability is currently still sadly lacking (as was Google’s before 2006), the image below suggests that the potential for rolling this out successfully globally is just vast. Don’t forget, Apple already has the apps “indexed”, it just needs to provide greater access to them via a more effective search paradigm.

Multilingual Keyword Search Works - Sort Of

The Big Question Is: Will Apple Keep Android Listings?

Chomp currently lists Android apps too. The big question is whether Apple will continue this with some revised version of the App Store. I suspect they will close down the Android side — even though I believe this would be a strategic error.

Obviously users of Android phones only really want to find listings which will work on the Android platform — and vice versa for iPhone and iPad users. But if you’re looking for a solution for a particular business problem, wouldn’t it make sense if you could search for that before choosing which phone you buy?

A universal search engine also builds better brand loyalty and would, in my view, enable Apple to stay firmly in charge of the market which they created.

Some Brands Will Clearly Be Winners!

Above, you can see how one brand marketer is already benefitting through German language searches in targeting the Austrian market.

This image is included solely to help you visualize the potential, particularly if you’re a brand marketer in a world where even Google says that more than 50% of searches will eventually come from a mobile device with more than a billion people globally using them.

Will Keyword Search Become Part Of The Mix?

Chomp Already Offers Keyword Search Advertising

You may not be aware of it, but Chomp already offers keyword advertising. What a fantastic tool for Apple to make more money from apps in which it then shares a margin for every sale. In this context, Apple is a step ahead of Google.

But this is also a big opportunity for advertisers and search marketers to get involved right now as this market develops.

Keyword Research Is Already Possible

See below for some rather rudimentary data which Chomp publishes on popular searches. You can already see the lack of sophistication from searchers using Chomp since it doesnt really make sense that “Apps” is so frequently a component of the keyword — in a search engine which, for now, only lists apps.

Rough And Ready Keyword Search Is Already Available

What The Chomp Team Needs To Fix

There have always been weaknesses in the App Store and Chomp doesn’t solve all of them. For international search marketers, they need to fix the following:

• Geo-targeting by country – for searchers and advertisers
• Geo-targeting by language – for searchers and advertisers
• Much more relevant search results
• More effective social sharing

I’m pretty puzzled (please explain someone) why more of us are not talking about this. The game is about to start – it’s time to get on board!

How? Here are a few ideas which might help:

• Analyse the keyword searches on Chomp to better understand the mobile user
• Develop and launch an app or two
• Advertise against keyword searches on Chomp
• Review strategies to see if apps can replace web investments

Don’t forget that people who are searching Chomp are searching for solutions. They have a need to solve — just like any searcher at Google!

During the game, mobile consumers stepped up, delivering record mobile search, social, and video activity. Yet most advertisers looked unprepared, seemingly without a mobile game plan. Many enabled Shazam users to tag commercials, but only a few ads targeted or even recognized mobile consumers.

Every advertiser had the same prime-time opportunities to connect with mobile consumers. Brands that did won big, during and after the game. Here are seven most missed out on:

Converting Viewers Into ‘Doers’

Mobile users are action-oriented. Altimeter reported after the game that 32% of Super Bowl ads lacked a URL, and only 16% integrated Twitter hashtags. The first spot to integrate SMS call-to-action was at halftime by the NFL (hailed an overwhelming success). The 2-minute warning came before viewers saw the first and only integrated QR code from GoDaddy (which drove new sales records).

These two both targeted mobile viewers by providing mobile shortcuts to help viewers take action instantly. Most missed this. Hulu, for example, promoted watching TV programming from the Hulu Plus mobile app. Great mobile innovation, but the ad failed to provide mobile links or QR codes to help mobile users find and download the app.

Dominating The Mobile Search Line

Google announced after the game a record 41% of ad-related smartphone searches were conducted. The most popular mobile searches were for advertisers like M&Ms and Acura – likely people wanting to replay the commercials.

This is mobile prime time! Mobile searchers should be seeing your mobile site links, Local listings, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube profiles and iOS/Android App pages on Page 1 of the organic SERPs.

H&M did better than most advertisers here, getting nearly all their assets on Page 1 of Google’s tablet and smartphone SERPs: Mobile brand pages, Local links, Facebook profile, Google Plus page, iOS, Android apps. Given their racy, hashtagged ad, it is a bit ironic that H&M’s two “MIA” profiles would be Twitter and YouTube.

Getting Mobile Fans In The Game

Twitter hit record levels of tweet volumes during the game. It’s likely that 60% or more were from mobile devices. Contrast that to just 16% of advertisers actively targeting mobile social users with integrated hashtags or Facebook pages (none promoted Google Plus pages).

Audi’s integration of the #SoLongVampires hashtag was so successful, it drove millions of incremental post-game ad views on YouTube. That’s prime time! MetLife and GE Appliances pointed viewers at Facebook pages to encourage likes and relationships. Make sure your Facebook profile can be easily accessed and engaged from smartphones and tablets. They may be forced to login first.

Delivering On The Mobile Web

What about when mobile viewers requested brand sites directly?

Mobile formatted content can reduce 80% of mobile site abandonment. Nearly all the retail and auto brands delivered here: Best Buy, Teleflora, Chevy, Chrysler, and Coke are just a few that made sure smartphone users were greeted by mobile formatted content.

Deeper site pages were another story. These pages get displayed as sitelinks in mobile search results and are shared more often on social networks. In my own analysis, mobile viewers had about a 50/50 chance of seeing mobile versions of deep pages. Kia, Met Life, and Coke are a few that missed this opportunity.

Avoiding iOS Fumbles

M&M’s and Doritos may had two of the most loved Super Bowl commercials, but Flash made both their websites anything but “sexy” for iOS users. With iPhone and iPad users now driving over 50% of mobile web traffic, this is a prime time fumble.

Coke’s “Polar Bowl” app was also great entertainment; fun, popular, worth socializing, perfect for dedicating a third device to – just not the iPad or iPhone. That’s probably due to cutting edge HTML5 streaming limitations. Still, with both bears updating faux-iPads or smartphones, mobile seemed more like a prop than an enabler for consuming and sharing the ad.

Even broadcast network NBC fumbled here, making the game’s commercials available for immediate replay online, just not for half the mobile world that uses iOS.

Getting Apps Off The Bench

Nearly 90% of Super Bowl advertisers have iOS and/or Android apps. Only 3% promoted their app. Like Hulu, none integrated active links, SMS, or QR to help viewers download the apps. But, GoDaddy, eTrade, and Cars.com at least made their apps easily accessible from their mobile home page.

Many missed the opportunity completely to let ad media indirectly drive app downloads, usage, popularity, and ROI.

Winning The Video Replay Challenge

Finally, 40% of mobile consumers responded to commercials. For weeks after the game, millions will view the spots at YouTube on multiple devices – desktop, smartphone, tablet, connected TV. The easier it is to consume these spots on mobile devices, the more likely consumers are to share across their networks, driving more search and social visibility, and more video views.

This highlights the real opportunity of integrating mobile calls-to-action, search, social, web, apps and video media: the football game can be over, yet the $3.5 million spend can continue paying dividends with more engagement, and more traffic to brand sites, apps, and social profiles, at no extra cost.

In football, no team is guaranteed a spot in the big game. Defending champions? Best record in the league? Doesn’t matter. It’s earned. Mobile is like that. Take those opportunities for granted, and your competitors will take them from you. (Just ask the Green Bay Packers.)

Here’s to the brands who were ready to deliver in prime time to win Mobile Bowl I.

I once sat in front of a dark, Netflix-enabled flat-screen, watching Netflix on my iPhone. It was just easier, and I had it on, and I could switch back and forth with Facebook, and… ok, maybe I have a problem!

In any event, our personal fascination with mobile phones shouldn’t dictate our work decisions. And one question that needs deciding more and more these days is around mobile search: is there a mobile audience for this particular client? And how do we measure the success of our efforts to get a mobile website in front of mobile searchers?

Of course, our past experience with desktop search gives us a great starting point. Search volumes, traffic, and even rankings are useful metrics, both here and there. But mobile SEO brings some special considerations, not least of which is credibility: we need to prove that mobile SEO provides value.

To that end, I’ve been working on a set of metrics to help me get some perspectives on these questions. These aren’t replacements for visitor counts or conversions – rather, think of them as supplements to help us compare the new and somewhat unfamiliar mobile SEO data to our tried-and-true desktop data.

Today we’ll look at one of the most useful, particularly in the early stages of a campaign.

The Mobile Ratio

One of the challenges in getting started with mobile search is proving the value of your efforts: is anyone using a phone to search for this client’s products or services?

To answer that with a simple, understandable metric, I’ve added a Mobile Ratio to the keyword research process. Basically, I’ll start by taking a desktop keyword list, and running the numbers to add mobile figures alongside. I’ll also expand the list if I find any mobile-specific keywords that seem interesting.

Then I’ll take the desktop and mobile volumes, and divide one into the other to compute the Mobile Ratio. For example, if I have a Mobile Ratio of 10, then I can tell the client that for every ten desktop searchers, we have the opportunity to reach one mobile searcher.

Straightforward statements like that allow a client to get their bearings, and start to form a mental model of what mobile means to them. Maybe they’d really like to add another one-tenth to their reach. Or maybe they have easier ways of getting access to those extra eyeballs. Either way, they now have some useful infomation on which to base a decision.

Getting Granular

Doing this at both the keyword and aggregate level allows you to compare and contrast mobile activity for different keywords. So if my aggregate Mobile Ratio is 10, but I have a group of keywords that have ratios in the 5-6 range, then I know these keywords are mobile-heavy: they are more likely to be of interest to mobile users.

This is key info for site-planning and budgeting activities, as it can provide a business justfication for heavying-up on landing pages that address those keywords. Likely examples of keywords that are mobile-heavy could include coupon keywords, or keywords that include a location name.

The Mobile Ratio lets you identify keywords that are mobile-heavy. Here, "pocket knife" searches are strong, while branded searches ("Victorinox") are relatively light. Good inputs for planning a mobile content strategy. (Not one of my clients, by the way.)

Driving Strategy

In the end, the Mobile Ratio doesn’t create another data point. Instead, it offers a more intuitive way of looking at the data you already have, turning it into a KPI that you can use to make decisions about your mobile marketing plans.

In upcoming articles, we’ll take a look at some other useful metrics for managing mobile SEO.

According to Goldman, 7% of all online sales Kenshoo saw over the holidays came from a tablet, and “Of the sales transactions completed via mobile, over 83% of the revenue was driven through tablets, and overall tablet conversion rate was 2.72%, more than 3x higher the conversion rate for mobile phones.

Additionally, the average order value from tablets ($149.84) actually exceeded that of desktop computers ($146.07).”

On top of that, tablet ownership nearly doubled over the holidays, according to Pew Internet.

With numbers like these, it’s clear that there’s an opportunity for marketers in tablets in 2012. What’s not clear is what marketers need to do to target tablet searchers effectively.

Do tablet owners search? If so, how do they search, what do they search for, and is it different from desktop and/or mobile search? How can content owners and advertisers build content today to effectively engage this highly lucrative tablet segment?

Fortunately, there are some things that we know about tablet owners that can help us get a better sense of what they’re looking for and how to give it to them:

Tablet Owners Are Searchers

Not only do tablet users buy a lot on their tablets, but they search a lot too. According to Google research, tablet owners reported that searching was the second most frequent activity (with 78% of users responding that they search for information on their tablets) behind playing games.

Tablet searchers account for a significant portion of mobile searches, according to Performics, who reported tablet accounts for 34% of mobile impressions on average, and as much as 50% for some advertisers. Marin Software reports that tablet search accounted for 3% of total impressions and 4% of total clicks in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Tablet Search Behavior Is Different

Last week, Resolution Media spent two days with the search engines planning strategy for 2012. And while I can’t talk about most of what was discussed, both Google and Yahoo! made a point of saying that tablet search behavior is different than mobile or desktop search behavior, and that campaigns and ad groups should be separated by platform for the best performance.

Last year at SMX West, Jacquelyn Krones of Bing and Taylor Schreiner of Yahoo! presented research to this end on tablet searchers’ user experience and goals. Krones gave marketers a model for understanding tablet users’ needs based on Mission, Excavation, and Exploration:

Unlike mobile (i.e. smartphone and featurephone) searchers, tablet searchers are not focused on completing a task (Mission), but are instead using the search engines on their devices to find new and interesting content, without really knowing what they are looking to find (Exploration). And neither tablet nor mobile searchers are using their devices for multi-step problem solving (Excavation).

Indeed, a Yahoo! Research/Reprise Media study at that time on mobile and tablet search behavior called “Searching on Glass” indicates that tablet searchers are more likely to search different categories (e.g. Real Estate, Investing, TV/Cable) and less likely to search others (e.g. Insurance, Deposits, Brand) than mobile and PC users.

Tablet users are also searching at different times than mobile and PC users. According to Google research, desktop searchers search during the day, and tablet and mobile searchers search at night. Google later draws the conclusion that desktop and laptop computers are for work, and tablets are more for entertainment at home.

Tablet Searchers Are Not Quite Mobile

A lot of people consider a tablet a mobile device, but research shows that most people aren’t mobile when they’re using it. Most of them are, in fact, on the couch, watching TV, in the kitchen or in bed.

If you’re lumping tablets and smartphones in the same ad group, or serving content created for mobile users to tablet users, you could be serving your customers content they don’t want.

Google (or at least Maile Ohye) recommends serving desktop content to tablet users, as they more closely resemble desktop users than mobile users in terms of behavior; but Adobe says the best option is to build tablet optimized experiences, separate from mobile or desktop sites.

Tablet Searchers Are Not Quite PC Searchers

One reason to build separate experiences rather than providing desktop content to tablet searchers is that tablet searchers aren’t able to access certain technologies that PC users are. The iPad, for example, is the market leader with 58% market share, and none of them run Adobe Flash.

If you’re using Flash to run videos on your site, or if you have a restaurant or other local business that tablet or smartphone users are likely to visit and you have a user experience that relies on Flash, you have two choices in this era of smartphones and tablets:

1. get rid of it and build an experience in HTML5 that can be dynamic and accessible to multiple devices, or
2. be invisible to the majority of tablet and smartphone users and risk frustrating this large and growing audience and/or losing them as customers.

Tablet Searchers are Looking for…?

It’s strange that all three major search engines tell us that tablet search behavior is different, but give us only desktop keywords in keyword tools to help us develop relevant content.

You can find tablet keywords in analytics, of course.

In Google Analytics, it’s as simple as going to the mobile devices report and then filtering with the following regular expression to isolate popular tablets:

tablet|tab|pad|slate|thinkpad|viewpad|ipad|lifebook|nook|windpad|xoom|xtablet|flybook|g-slate|ideapad|kindle|modbook|multipad|olivepad|paddle|playbook|quadpad|slimbook|t-touch|tuftab

Select the secondary dimension “Keyword” to see what tablet owners are searching for.

The problem with this method, of course, is that you can only see keywords that your site is optimized for, and not keywords that you should be optimized for.

To see that, we want to use a keyword tool, but at the moment the only keyword tool that I know of that includes tablets is the Google Keyword Tool. It’s currently impossible to find popular tablet keywords with it, however, as they’re lumped in with smartphone keywords.

Given that tablet searchers have different needs and search behavior than desktop or mobile searchers, it’s likely that they also use different keywords with different frequencies. The Reprise Media/Yahoo! study hints at that with the different categories that they uncover, but marketers currently can’t do much keyword research on their own without a specific tablet breakout.

My hope is that Google and the other search engines break out tablet queries separately in the Google Keyword Tool and similar tools so that marketers can optimize the user experience based on what tablet searchers are looking for.

Google has optimized their user experience for each platform, so they must understand content owners’ desire to do the same for their users. If you want to join me in this request, please show your support in the Google Adwords Support Forum, where I’ve formally posted this feature request.

Until then, hopefully this information on tablet searchers and their intent gives you a better sense of of what’s necessary to target tablet searchers in this oft-described “year of the tablet”.

Happy (belated) New Year. Let’s face it, 2012 isn’t the first year someone has christened the “year of mobile.” But it is the first time consumers have done so – and continue to.

Still in the market for resolutions? Let me suggest 10 that’ll charge-up your brand to set pace – and lead – with mobile in 2012:

Think Mobile First

Smartphones most likely rang in 2012 by blowing past 100 million US subscribers. That means there’s a 50% chance your customers are now holding a smartphone; and 80% are using it to change how they shop. Plus, 2012 forecasts call for a 73% rise in m-commerce sales and 60% rise in tablet sales.

Resolution number one: challenge yourself to see your brand as mobile consumers do. Align marketing strategies with these expectations.

This may require difficult change – like relaxing desktop-biased ROI requirements that impair mobile resourcing. (The same “innovator dilemma” that trapped RIM!) Just do it.

Listen To Mobile Searchers

Google mobile query volume is up 400%. Smartphone and tablet keyword data is a goldmine for quantifying mobile impact and understanding intent.

Google began stripping this from organic search results in 2011. But they’re not yet stripping smartphone or tablet keyword data. (Read more here).

This will change (probably later this year), once marketers are more vested in mobile content. For now, resolve to take advantage: listen to what smartphone and tablet users want from you, while you can!

Invest In Mobile Pages

Consumers expect every desktop web page to have a relevant mobile equivalent.

In fact, lack of mobile content decreases mobile PPC quality score, drives 80% of mobile site abandonment, and forces nearly 20% of consumers to seek your competitors. Ouch!

Armed with data (as above), challenge yourself to prioritize and create mobile formatted content, starting with those that get traffic from smartphones and tablets. And don’t stop there! Continue optimizing smartphone and tablet pages for mobile SERP keyword rankings.

Connect With The Long-Tail

Mobile content needs to be accessible from any entry point. Last year, we found 81% of retail web pages fail to direct mobile consumers to relevant mobile pages.

We called this the invisible Web of mobile content. It’s a mobile ROI killer! Forge these connections between deep desktop and mobile pages. You help people buy more across mobile channels (Display, SMS, Email, Social, PPC).

With Google’s new smartphone bot, you also increase rankings in mobile SERPs for long-tail keyword searchers. Bonus!

Make Local Connections

Mobile users search with local and immediate intent. 60% visit a local business. 88% take action within the day.

Google Maps is the second most used app across iOS and Android. So claim, and optimize, business/store profiles to display at the top of mobile SERPs for your brand.

Go beyond Google Places/Maps and Bing Maps. Optimize for social networks that provide location information through apps too, like Facebook Places, now Foursquare, and others.

Simplify App Discovery

You’ve got iOS and Android apps. Discovery is the challenge. Fortunately, app profile pages can act like additional “sitelinks” in Google’s mobile SERPs. (See last month’s column on App SEO tips.)

Searching the app stores stinks. Help brand searchers discover your apps easily! If your apps are already ranked on the first page of mobile SERPs, try showing up for head terms.

Turn Searchers Into Followers

Mobile helps us be social. Devices already drive 55% of Twitter traffic, and 33% of Facebook’s. Like apps, social profiles also present opportunity to monopolize the first page of your mobile SERP listings.

So help motivated searchers find your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, or other profiles on page 1 of mobile SERPs. Measure increases in follows, likes, and subscribers that result!

Don’t Ignore “App-tribution”

People prefer apps over web when using popular Social and Local services (Maps/Places, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare). The problem is, apps aren’t “referrers” (read more here).

As these apps increase in popularity, more of your clicks get classified as “direct” traffic. Challenge yourself in 2012 to be accurate with mobile attribution.

One method gaining traction among retailers: seed Local and Social profiles with branded redirect links that populate web analytics. By giving ROI credit to the right channel, you can optimize your marketing spend!

Give Thoughtful Shortcuts

You may have a complete digital presence (web, mobile, apps, social, locations, video, etc). Make it more inviting for mobile consumers to navigate!

Consider how QR technology can help. QR isn’t just for print; it can actually provide the perfect “screen-to-screen” mobile link that consumers expect for faster access and deeper engagement with your content. Here are a few cross-channel ideas:

• Mobile apps: Don’t make people search app stores. Displaying app QRs on your site increases downloading, engagement, and popularity.
• Store locator: Don’t make people type your address into the Maps app. Displaying QRs on your desktop page can launch a location on the device’s Map app.
• Product videos: People prefer to watch videos on their device. Displaying QRs on product pages can launch video content and drive mobile viewing and sharing metrics.

Challenge yourself to make these shortcuts for time-strapped consumers. (Read more on converting URLs to QR here, here, here or consult our free Guide to Creating QR Codes.)

Re-imagine The Landing Page

People are spending 30% more time with popular apps vs sites for good reasons: faster access, native tools (like GPS), less login hassle. But this also pretty much shatters the concept of a Web “landing page.”

Trying to maximize engagement on, say a Facebook campaign? You may want to launch the user’s app. But what platform are they using? Is the app installed? Does it support URL schemes? Does the scheme differ by platform? Is there a fallback URL? (HTML5 apps aren’t the answer yet.)

New link routing logic is in order. So your final resolution of 2012: Consider strategies and deploying app-sensitive link technology to connect more mobile consumers with your campaigns in the optimal fashion.

Make no mistake: Mobile consumers have spoken emphatically. Here’s to you, making 2012 the “year of mobile” for your brand!

IgnitionOne said that among its retail clients, “Mobile search [  ] accounted for 24% of retailers’ total paid search budgets on Black Friday, compared to 14.2% of the total during all of Q4. This represents enormous growth compared to Q4 2010, when mobile search spend accounted for only 5.2% of total retail paid search spend.”

The following chart from IgnitionOne shows the growth of mobile impressions, clicks and search ad spend vs. 2010.

The Marin Software report says the company is seeing increased adoption of mobile and tablet advertising among its clients. More significantly, however, its clients’ campaigns on mobile are “showing significantly better performance than similar campaigns on desktop computers.”

Marin published comparisons for its aggregated search campaigns across PC and mobile. As the chart below indicates, paid search ads on smartphones and tablets outperformed those on the PC in terms of CTRs.