Thursday, 22 September 2011
How well a website optimises for mobile is to become a key factor within Google’s AdWords Quality Score, as the company continues its ‘mobile first’ strategy.
It means that ads that have mobile-optimised landing pages will perform better in AdWords auctions, with Google recognising how much traffic is being generated by people searching via mobile.
David Nachum, Google’s product manager for mobile ads, made the announcement via a post on the company’s AdWords blog.
“A poor mobile web experience can negatively shape a consumer’s opinion of a brand or company and make it hard for them to engage or make a purchase,” read the post.
Nachum went on to say that optimising a website for mobile will generally drive more traffic to your site at a lower cost.
“A recent study, which asked users about the performance of mobile websites, found that 61% of users are unlikely to return to a website that they had trouble accessing from their phone,” he added.
Last year, Google began limiting ads served to smartphone users if they pointed towards landing pages with content not optimised for mobile devices. The search giant is now encouraging advertisers to optimise their campaigns for mobile.
The move follows the launch of Google Mobilise in June, a set of tools to let businesses optimise their mobile sites free of charge and is predominantly targeted towards the SME sector (nma.co.uk 29 June 2011).
Separately, Google has announced that its Get Mobilised service, which offers advertisers tips on how to optimise their campaigns for mobile, is now available for UK businesses. It was previously only available in the US.
Google Quality Score explained
- Quality score determines how Google ranks ads in its ad space auctions.
- The usual factors that determine this include cost of the keyword triggering the ad, the quality of a webpage and its loading time, as well as click-through rates of the ad.
- Following the above announcement, a website’s optimisation for mobile users will now be factored into this ranking system.
