Mobile Clicks But Doesn’t Convert — What To Do

As covered here and in numerous other blogs and studies, mobile Web traffic has grown exponentially over the last decade. With it has grown mobile ad click-through rates, which according to Adroit Digital’s research, outstrip CTRs for desktop in all age categories.

Users of all ages are more likely to click on mobile ads.

But for all their clicks, customers on their phones don’t seem to be converting at the same rate as when they’re sitting at their desktops.

Mobile conversion rates are 1/3 that of desktop.

So what’s a savvy digital marketer to do? Should we really be curbing our digital advertising spends in light of this research? Or does it lie within our power to improve conversions? Do we simply accept mobile’s role in the upper end of the purchasing funnel? All of the above?

Curb Mobile Ad Spend?

Search Engine Watch recently conducted an experiment with promoted tweets, keeping everything the same except for the targeted device (desktop vs. mobile). As expected, mobile garnered almost twice as many clicks but had a 60 percent lower conversion rate and a 160 percent higher acquisition cost.

This experiment is a powerful lesson to marketers – urging us to consider our end goals and budget in conjunction with the channel we’re using. It doesn’t mean we should abandon digital altogether, but perhaps we should curb our mobile ad spend when we’re looking to maximize certain conversions (such as downloading a white paper, which was the experiment’s CTA) and/or control cost-per-lead.

Improve Mobile Conversions – Or Change Definition?

Still, with some help from Unbounce, hope remains for both mobile landing pages and conversions. It’s ok to ask mobile users to complete a form, but that form had better be concise (four fields or less) and friendly, with fields auto switching the device’s keyboard from alpha to numeric where appropriate.

And perhaps instead of form completions or click-throughs, the real conversion we should be measuring on mobile is the click-to-call rate.

Phone calls are a great KPI to measure for mobile.

Calls may seem old-school in this day and age, but for all their intelligence, smartphones are still phones.

Accept It?

Of course, just because mobile ads/pages aren’t leading to instantaneous, quantifiable conversions, it doesn’t mean they’re not helping customers along their buying journeys. As Strands Retail points out, mobile is primarily used for upper funnel activities like product discovery, browsing, research and comparison.

Experiences? Opinions?

What’s been your experience with mobile conversion rates? Do you think they’ll ever catch up to desktop? Why or why not? Is that ok?

Changing Channels with Consumers

To be effective, marketing messages have to be delivered to the right consumers through the right channels. But these days, as new channels pop up almost daily, which are the right ones?

Obviously, a question that crucial is going to have a complex answer — several, in fact. This blog will attempt to chip away at some of those answers as we explore the role of emerging media channels in the marketing/communications field.

Let’s start with the data. The ways in which people access information online have changed. This time last year marked the first time mobile-only Internet access topped desktop-only Internet access.

Mobile Internet growth has not only increased the amount of time people spend online, it’s also given rise to unique mobile-first and/or mobile-only apps and platforms like Instagram, Vine and Snapchat.

But just because consumers are more connected to the Internet, does that mean they want to be more connected to brands and advertisers? Just because they’re on these emerging platforms, does that necessarily mean they expect advertisers to be there too?

As in any realm, actions speak louder than words, and so far, consumers appear to be responding to brands in the ever-widening online landscape, if ad click-through rates are any indication.

Bolstered by numbers like these, advertisers’ confidence in the power of digital seems to be increasing — along with their spend. While digital accounted for just 28% of the country’s $187 billion ad spend in 2015, it is the fastest growing segment, by far.

But as this graphic shows, the advertising industry isn’t truly changing channels as it was defined back in the days of non-voice-activated remotes and VCRs; that is, we’re not watching (spending on) only one channel at the the exclusion of everything else that’s on. Instead we marketers can think of our digital spend as the channel/show we’re most excited about, the one we’re going to watch live because is has the most potential impact. We watch it not because we want to miss the other shows that are on (or in this analogy, the more traditional media channels we can advertise on), it’s just that those other shows are slightly less important to us and so can be recorded by our DVR, watched online or caught up on via Netflix, YouTube, etc.

Just as consumers use a variety of channels to keep up with their favorite shows, modern marketers must use a variety of channels to keep up with their consumers. But which channels should be primary, which secondary and which ignored entirely? How do we even use some of the newer channels? Which channels can be combined for maximum effectiveness? Which channels hold the most appeal for select demographics? Stay tuned…