Search News: Mobile Search Comes of Age
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Written By Noah Mallin | December 9, 2008 | Share This
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For a while there it seemed that Google was so big and so flush with cash that they were ready to try out any of their employees 20% time projects regardless of merit or relevance. Now that we are in an economic crunch it seems that the GoogleCopter and Google Brand chewing gum are destined to die in Beta and the Search giant is taking a good hard look at how to make more money from their existing properties and search expertise.
While rolling out the search ad platform for YouTube was one step, rolling out AdWords for HTML enabled mobile search is another big leap forward. You can bet Google wouldn’t have done this if there hadn’t been demand from advertisers.
The demand is coming from the huge new audience of HTML mobile search users being created by Apple’s uber-succesful iPhone. Apple’s almost 7 million units shifted in the last quarter were more than in any other quarter of iPhone sales – combined.
Reprise Media has been testing a variety of mobile search strategies using AdWords in advance of this upgrade and there is no doubt that the search audience for mobile is booming along with iPhone sales. While the overall CPC (cost per click) for mobile search ads is still relatively cheap compared to online search ads on Google’s platform, targeting the 3G can be almost twice as expensive as other mobile platforms.
There are good reasons for this. iPhone ads are getting to a more desirable slice of the mobile phone using market, and their web-browsing experience is superior to that of most other phones. However as RIM’s Blackberry starts to catch up on the browsing experience the price differential is likely to even out some – if not entirely.
What about Google’s G1 phone? The phone itself will probably end up like Chrome and a whole host of other Google efforts to diversify from search. The Google open mobile platform, Android, continues to attract industry supporters and may be a viable alternative for non-Apple phones.
The bottom line is that we all in the search marketing world are looking for the new growth trends for 2009, especially considering how challenging the year is shaping up to be. Mobile search ads could be one of the brightest spots in the coming year.
Like Chinese Democracy the age of mobile search has been long predicted, could 2009 be the year it finally comes to pass?
Topics: Google, Mobile, Reprise Media, Search: How-To, Search: News |