5 best practices to improve your mobile ads
There are many reasons why being mobile optimised is important for your business, such as to achieve a higher SEO ranking or to provide a good experience to all customers who use their smartphones to access your website or app.
It is essential that the ads created are targeted and designed for mobile and that the content you are going to present is fully responsive to avoid disappointing your customers.
Users spend a lot of time on their mobile phones: according to Statista, 60% of the 3.7 billion people active on social media are accessing it through their smartphones. What are the best practices to take advantage of this reality?
1) Choose the right channels
Some channels are more mobile-optimised than others. Even between different ad networks, some offer better mobile solutions.
Most of the platforms allow you to create mobile-only ads or, if you want more specific targeting, different ads for IOS or Android users, which gives you no excuse to build one-size-fits-all ads without any kind of targeting.
2) Ad copy
The ad copy should be short and simple; write specific text that is only displayed when users are on their mobile phones with short sentences that get straight to the point, so that users can act quickly when interested.
Call-to-action buttons usually work very well for mobile users, especially “phone calls” and “get directions”. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes: what are the most intuitive and rapid reactions when you see an interesting ad? You probably click on the link, make a phone call or look for directions, depending on the type of business you are looking for.
3) Ad extensions
Extensions for mobile ads are related to copy and the need for fast solutions. There are several solutions such as:
Phone number — Adding a phone number to your ads makes it clear that it is easy to call even without a clear call-to-action;
Message — This quite recent feature allows you to include the option for users to contact you via message and so be in touch very fast. This clearly generates a sense of your proximity and availability to interact with your customers and answer possible questions;
Price — Allow customers to have a look at prices straight away. This is a good feature when carefully used; otherwise it may drive away potential customers who are put off by the prices.
4) Location matters
Make sure you carefully select geo-targeting details in the campaign settings because it is key for mobile ads.
Using location-based advertising is worthwhile because of the important fact that users are most likely to visit a place if it is nearby; this is even more true of mobile advertising.
5) Match expectations
It is a waste of time building great mobile ads if you have a non-responsive website. There are many different technologies that offer easily built websites and guarantee they are fully responsive, so there is no excuse to have a desktop-only website nowadays as it will most likely make you lose customers.
Do not try to satisfy all the different types of customers with one solution. It may take a little bit longer to build your different ads separately, but it will produce better results.
