Search Advisory

Our coverage of SEMPO Atlanta’s Mobile Search event continues…

Host Matthew Pritchard of Google (& SEMPO Atlanta's VP of Sponsorships) thanks this year's sponsors

“Mobile Insights & Advertising Strategies”

By Paul Cushman, Senior Director, Mobile Sales Strategy, Yahoo!, @yahoo

While this particular audience probably didn’t need convincing as to the power of mobile, the data that Paul shared was attention-getting.  Papa John’s sold $1 million worth of pizza less than 6 months after implementing their mobile strategy.  eBay generated $2 billion worth of mobile sales in 2010.  Mobile commerce is expected to grow by 875% in the next 5 years.

Paul let us all in on a dirty little secret…mobile is the Internet, only smaller (shhh!).  People want to do the same things on their phones as they do on their desktop PCs.  So we can stop making this overly difficult.  In fact, if someone tells you that you’ve got to have a mobile website…do you really?  Think about it – it’s a phone – they can call you!

Regarding having a display ad on Yahoo mobile – that’s the only ad on the screen.  How much is that worth?

Yahoo and Bing combined have 650 million mobile searches a month.  The click-through rate on mobile phones is 3-5 times higher than it is on a PC.  People search using fewer words, probably partly due to “fat finger syndrome.”  They’re also less likely to search using brand-related keywords (3.8% of all searches, compared to 7.3% on a desktop and 4.8% on an iPad).

Mobile searchers skew younger – one quarter are under 25 years of age.  They also skew slightly more female (51%).  Desktop searches skew slightly less female (48%).

Mobile has time-shifted the first pixel of the day by 2½ hours.  That is, while most people use their PCs during business hours and some into the evening, mobile devices are used early in the morning (check the weather while you have your coffee) and late at night.  In fact, 10% of people admit to using their mobile phones in the bathroom, which Paul called a “magazine replacement” strategy.

Yahoo did a study of last year’s Academy Awards, studying mobile web traffic.  Not surprisingly, they found that it consistently spiked during the commercials.  TV advertisers should be very worried – if you have to run TV commercials, make sure you’ve got a compelling soundtrack because most people won’t be watching.

Paul invited audience members to attend a webinar on April 13 that will cover this topic in more depth.

There’s also a white paper about mobile advertising available.

Update: Paul’s presentation can be viewed here: http://www.slideshare.net/sempoatlanta/sempo-mobile-yahoo

This is part 2 of our 4-part series on SEMPO Atlanta’s Mobile Search event held March 31.  For all posts in this series, click here.