Marketers love mobile and have been increasing their mobile advertising budgets steadily in recent years. Mobile ad spend is predicted to top $100 billion worldwide in 2016, but in order for this to happen marketers will need to be able to prove why mobile deserves such a large portion of their budgets.
Unfortunately, mobile ROI isn’t always the easiest thing to measure. While the metrics largely remain the same (conversions, leads, pipeline, revenue, etc.), the way the data is captured is very different. Smartphones are used differently than desktop computers, and in order to track your ad campaign success you need to adapt how you capture mobile analytics.
Optimize Your Campaigns With Complete Mobile Attribution
Optimization of any advertising campaign requires rock-solid attribution. Knowing what specific keywords, ads, and campaigns are driving people to take actions allows you to focus your ad spend on those things that are truly driving revenue to your business. Performance data for your ads and your campaigns are available inside of any advertising platform, but you are not able to connect these metrics back to actual prospects or revenue. Typically, this data is captured by the forms that you have on your website, but this is not sufficient for mobile for one key reason.
There is something fundamentally different about how customers interact with business on mobile devices compared to desktop. Customers do not want to connect with your business by filling out a form on their smartphone and instead opt for a simpler contact method – a phone call. Data from our research arm, DialogTech Insights, shows that calls from mobile sources are up 34% in the past 6 months alone. For many marketers this poses a huge problem. When somebody is served one of your display ads on their mobile device or hits that call button from their Google search results, what you thought was rock solid attribution vanishes into thin air. To fill this black hole in your attribution, you need to be able to attribute these calls the same way you would a form. With call attribution you can pinpoint which ads, search keywords, and campaigns are driving calls to your business. Only then can you truly optimize your mobile ad campaigns for what is driving conversions.
Prove Results by Capturing Every Mobile Conversion
Digital advertising is designed to drive results for your business. Only when ads drive customers to connect with your company can they be deemed successful. Online conversions are relatively easy to capture and this data can be found in digital ad platforms and web analytics platforms alike. Through the use of marketing automation and forms, online conversions can even be connected to prospects and tracked all the way through to revenue. But, if you are only able to connect revenue driven by online mobile conversions, you are missing a huge portion of revenue and your budget will take a hit.
With so many mobile users choosing to convert over the phone, it is crucial that you have the ability to capture these conversions and attribute them back to your advertising. And these are often the most valuable type of conversions because they turn into revenue 10 to 15 times more than web forms. Connecting these conversions to their opportunities and revenue allow you to prove how your mobile advertising efforts are paying off. You can justify a much larger mobile budget when you have the ability to prove how your mobile advertising is generating conversions both online and offline.
Marketers are pouring advertising dollars into mobile, and for good reason. But in order to continue increasing their mobile budgets they have to prove mobile’s value. When you only have the ability to capture online data and conversions you are not giving your mobile advertising a fair chance. To continue advocating for the growth of your mobile budget, you need to be able to capture conversions that occur both online and over the phone. Only then can you prove the full value of your mobile ads.
If you are interested in learning more about how to optimize and prove the value of your mobile advertising, check out our recent webinar, Advanced Conversion Strategies for Mobile Search: Secrets to More Clicks, Calls, and Sales.
