Mobile Version of Your Website

The mobile version of your website is an additional source of revenue for your company!

It's early in the mobile ad game, but not too early to be testing out how to make a return on your mobile media.

When you have a mobile site and it is a good experience, you will build a mobile audience and get people to repeat visit.   You can make money on those eyeballs just like the desktop web.   A mobile phone website will help you to  build a viable audience with a strong demographic base in a new channel.   Mobile web traffic will deliver both new customers who are looking for your site ‘on the go’ (maybe using a search engine) as well as mobile viewers who enter your desktop URL (autodetection will send them to the mobile site). 

Every view of your mobile site is an opportunity to monetize your new media.

What is Mobile Advertising? 

It is similar to online advertising but the reach potential is far greater.  Start with the opportunity to reach 4 billion people (compare to 1 billion on your desktop computer).

How can you get a ROI for mobile advertising or marketing when using the MoFuse platform?

Here are the most direct ways today to get started:

1.    Sell a sponsorship to a local advertiser in your area or a company partner-  for a flat fee that would have a specific duration.  For example, perhaps you get a partner to sponsor all of your mobile views for 6 months for a fee of $3000.00.  You will be surprised to find how many of your partners will want to advertise on mobile - if you can deliver the valuable mobile eyeballs!

2.    Use one of the standard mobile ad networks to put ads on your site.  You can easily do this through the MoFuse interface “Monetize” button.  You can also use MoFuse Ad Network where we optimize about 6 mobile networks to provide the best ad for your site.

Every view of your mobile site is an opportunity to monetize your new media.

The forms of mobile advertising have been emerging for a number of years and are as follows:

Mobile banner ads – small graphical ads that are very similar in nature to desktop website banner ads.  They present a call to action (albeit smaller), placed top or bottom of the mobile web page.  When clicked, they take you to a mobile landing page (easily built on the MoFuse platform by the way).

Text links – similar to banner ads, except they are a text call to action link, when clicked take you to a landing page.

SMS - Text messaging – more like email marketing than advertising -  this is where you get to use the texting ability available on 100% of mobile phones worldwide.  That is some reach potential!  Like email,  a person must  opt-in to receive messages from you.   They will give you their mobile phone number and select perhaps some message category that you will send them (ie, sports scores, weather alerts, coupons or specials).   You may send short text messages to them of 160 characters.  Virtually every mobile phone in the world supports SMS so it is ubiquitous in its reach.

MMS -  multimedia messaging – is just like SMS but you get to send very fancy messages!   MMS is a rich messaging capability that allows for sending messages that include video, audio, photos and text.  MMS is not yet universally supported throughout the world via carriers.  But it is something you should know about and watch as it becomes more
prevalent throughout the coming years.  MMS is a significant advertising opportunity in the future!

Mobile TV advertising – OK just like TV advertising but done on the tiny screen.  The mobile ad will be a still or video ad place before, during or after a streaming mobile video.

Mobile applications – You can actually display ads inside of mobile apps.  Generally these are banners or ‘interstitials’ that show up between app actions.

For a comprehensive view  of mobile advertising guidelines you will want to check out the Mobile Marketing Association's (MMA)  guide
 
Every view of your mobile site is an opportunity to monetize your new media!

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It is far and away the most asked question from MoFuse customers:

Can we place our web site analytics tag on our mobile website hosted by MoFuse?

Mobile web analytics are on everyone's mind. Once your mobile site is up and running, of course you want to know what your mobile web audience is doing and how you can improve their experience. 

However analytics for a desktop web site are fundamentally different than mobile web analytics in a few important ways:  

•    The execution of the measurement on the mobile site  - is different
•    The types  of data that you can capture – are different
•    Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you will want to consider – are different

The Execution

There are 1000’s of different devices accessing your mobile site and most of them cannot handle cookie or tag technology which are standards for desktop site analytics to work.  Desktop website analytics refers to the measurement of visitors and their activities during the course of their visit to your site.  The most popular website analytics are performed today using page tags or log file analysis to track users.  Page tagging collects information via a code snippet or “tag” placed on your website which records and sends data to a third party for reporting and analysis. 

The problem:  tags for desktop sites are generally JavaScript which simply won’t do the job for the  mobile web.  JavaScript cannot be handled by most handsets or mobile browser technology.  Therefore, merely using the same tags that you use to measure desktop site just won’t work.  Worse, if you try to use them you will get results that will give you false or incomplete information!

Other standard methods for desktop site analytics such as HTTP Cookies, HTTP referrer and IP address information are also not supported by the majority of mobile browsers.  Even if they are, the data returned would be misleading due to the location of the Carrier’s IP gateway.

Collecting analytical data from your mobile site simply isn’t as straightforward as it is on your desktop site.  Using some traditional tools, like Google Analytics will appear to work at one level, however it will also give you misleading information because it is only representing a small subset of your mobile visitors.

A Different Approach for Mobile Analytics

When you make a mobile version of your website you will want to consider image tags or beacons, link redirection and HTTP header analysis instead of JavaScript tags for analytics of your mobile site.  MoFuse Premium provides all the data you need to get a proper picture of your mobile web traffic.

The Types of Data are Different for Mobile

In addition to data elements you collect from a desktop site, you can also collect data such as device type, carrier, geographic location, language and unique visitor identification.  MoFuse collects these for you and if you are a Premium user you will get these in your analytics information.   Next we'll talk about Key Performance Indicators that you will want to consider for your mobile site.  How can you measure the success of the  mobile site vs. your desktop site?  It all has to do with the goals you have for each site.

A lot of people think that the mobile web is just a “mini” version of the desktop web. That iPhone made it possible to simply miniaturize your desktop site so it works just the same on a mobile device.

That’s just not the case today nor will it be the case in the future.  You need to have a mobile friendly site, one that is designed with the mobile web readers front and center.

Why? 

The first reason is real estate- that's a no brainer.  Smaller screen, you need to be more effective at getting the essential messages out there.

Second is – well – how will the mobile web audience find you?  Search of course!
You've probably already been to Google and other search engines on the mobile web.
When you put a term in that search engine on a mobile device, do you think they use the same search algorithms and rankings as on the desktop web?

No, actually they use very different rankings when they know that a search is being done from a mobile device!

About a year ago  Google was awarded a patent for mobile search.  Their mobile search patent explains that…

"The mobile search result quality scores and the generic search result quality scores were generated according to different scoring formulas. Based on one or more terms in the search query, the search query is classified as a mobile query. As a consequence, one or more search result quality scores are modified to improve the sorting of search results that include both mobile and generic search results."   You can read up more on this patent here at SEO Principle.com.

In March of this year Google announced that their mobile traffic had quintupled since 2007.  It’s no secret that iPhone also has helped mobile search grow exponentially. It got more people interested in using the mobile web - and when we went there, we hurried right to our old habits: Search.

And the types of searches we do on mobile are different.  According to Google Mobile ad sales director Diana Pouliot, Local search on the mobile device indexes higher than the desktop by about two to three times.  So what does that mean?  It means as people are getting very comfortable using the mobile internet – they are doing what you might expect- searching for things, companies, entertainment, restaurant and more. 

No surprise, Google dominates mobile search  but there are a lot of mobile search engines out there.



So will a mobile search engine really be different?

Yes. 

First it will recognize the searcher is mobile and therefore the ranking algorithm will be different.   It is looking for a mobile version of your website.  Also Mobile search engines will offer relevant information based on location (and that is one reason why local mobile search will be important).

So once again you need a mobile web site built for the mobile web.  If you use a provider like MoFuse we enable your mobile site to automatically be entered into all of the mobile search engines.  You will be ready for SEO the minute you use our mobile web tools.

You need to add a mobile sitemap. Search engines such as Google discover information about your site by employing software known as "spiders" to crawl the web. Once the spiders find a site, they follow links within the site to gather information about all the pages. The spiders periodically revisit sites to find new or changed content. Google Mobile Web Search crawls and indexes sites that have been specifically designed for mobile phones and devices. By using Mobile Sitemaps to inform and direct their crawlers, they continuously expand their coverage of the mobile web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to their mobile indexes.

The first step is realizing people will be searching for you on the mobile web - but most important you need to be ready with a mobile web enabled site- set up for Search!