This observation is similar to Accuracast's presentation at a recent mobile search conference in London, which I attended and covered on my news analysis & commentary site http://www.msearchgroove.com. Accuracast also posted a series of YouTube videos that deep-dive into Google's shortcomings in mobile search. They can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSI9obyGabA&feature=related
Another interesting source is Mobile Commerce, which has found the CTR on Yahoo ads is significantly higher than Google. This is based on Google's overall approach to ad placement, which is flawed and fails to showcase ads properly. Again, I cover this at my site.
In the early days of the Internet, people spent "optimistically" on web advertising, and measurement came later. If you bought an ad on an Internet page in 1996 you could be pretty sure that the viewer was (a) affluent -they had a PC, a modem, an ISP, a mouse, bought a TCP/IP stack and had downloaded a web browser. (b) Probably in the USA, UK, Germany, … i.e. countries like yours who understood your brands.
With mobile its the reverse. (a) 90% of mobile browsing is done by the least expensive 90% of handsets. There are relatively few users of expensive handsets and they don't browse much (according to analysis of handset types over the last year at bango's website). Also, a phone is cheap and the likelehood is that the regular browser is "shop girl" or "white van man" rather than "executive" or "free spending youth". (b) Have a look at bango's stats or admob and you will see that a very high proportion of traffic comes from india, china, indonesia, Kenya, south africa …. countries where most western brands (with the possible exception of cococola) have no relevance.
Therefore, the need to measure results and make sure that the sources of traffic you buy from can target by operator, country and device are even more critical.
Google has a long way to go to provide a sensible mobile analytics solution, and perhaps at the moment they are not motivated to do so – as they are currently (apparently) automatically placing web ads to mobile devices ….
This is something that I had told Google over a year ago already. You can read how to bypass this problem at http://www.affiliatetracking.de/adwords-hardly-tracks-mobile-conversions/
This observation is similar to Accuracast's presentation at a recent mobile search conference in London, which I attended and covered on my news analysis & commentary site http://www.msearchgroove.com. Accuracast also posted a series of YouTube videos that deep-dive into Google's shortcomings in mobile search. They can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSI9obyGabA&feature=related
Another interesting source is Mobile Commerce, which has found the CTR on Yahoo ads is significantly higher than Google. This is based on Google's overall approach to ad placement, which is flawed and fails to showcase ads properly. Again, I cover this at my site.
In the early days of the Internet, people spent "optimistically" on web advertising, and measurement came later. If you bought an ad on an Internet page in 1996 you could be pretty sure that the viewer was (a) affluent -they had a PC, a modem, an ISP, a mouse, bought a TCP/IP stack and had downloaded a web browser. (b) Probably in the USA, UK, Germany, … i.e. countries like yours who understood your brands.
With mobile its the reverse. (a) 90% of mobile browsing is done by the least expensive 90% of handsets. There are relatively few users of expensive handsets and they don't browse much (according to analysis of handset types over the last year at bango's website). Also, a phone is cheap and the likelehood is that the regular browser is "shop girl" or "white van man" rather than "executive" or "free spending youth". (b) Have a look at bango's stats or admob and you will see that a very high proportion of traffic comes from india, china, indonesia, Kenya, south africa …. countries where most western brands (with the possible exception of cococola) have no relevance.
Therefore, the need to measure results and make sure that the sources of traffic you buy from can target by operator, country and device are even more critical.
Google has a long way to go to provide a sensible mobile analytics solution, and perhaps at the moment they are not motivated to do so – as they are currently (apparently) automatically placing web ads to mobile devices ….
even i have felt this tracking google ad adwords for mobile is big headache