Mobile advertising - websites

Mobile is thought to be the ‘word of 2012’, however, I still see so many good examples, of brands being present in digital - facebook, twitter, social media, however, the number of good examples in mobile media is lacking. Well, yes, we all have heard of the Angry Birds – but that’s a mobile application that made a huge success and now you see angry birds’ presence offline (merchandise). But the number of good mobile banners and other types of adverts is still lacking. Well, maybe not, but they are not viral.

Mobile advertising/marketing topic is very interesting, and I am surprised I never posted here anything about it. Well, it might be because I have done my research earlier, and in January 2012 I wrote a 3,000 essay about mobile advertising and its’ challenges and opportunities. But today I would like to post here some stats, interesting facts and examples.

Let’s start with ‘simple’ ‘basic’ things – websites.

Only 20% of brands have a mobile site, which means they are likely to see huge bounces rates, diminished time on page and are unlikely to sell anything via mobile.

The mobile web is still not fully developed to give the best experience for the user. Many websites are still not optimised for the mobile. In fact, 61 per cent of users are unlikely to return to a site that they had trouble accessing from their phone and 40 per cent of consumers would go to a competitor’s site. Many companies are just missing opportunities of sales solely because they do not have mobile sites.

Of the 20 online retailers studied, just 12 offer a mobile optimised site for visitors. Since mobile commerce has been around long enough to show that it is a valuable and essential channel for any online retailer, this is surprising. 
The travel sites in this list are least likely to have mobile sites (or apps), and this is a sector which needs to wise up to mobile. Last year, 17% of consumers researched holidays using mobile, a trend which is set to continue.

Sometimes even the big brands that are truly ‘innovative’ are missing opportunities. A search for ‘Coke’ on mobile provides both a sponsored link and an organic result for cokezome.co.uk. The organic link takes you to a mobile site that allows you to redeem a code, but the sponsored link takes you to a London 2012 Coke desktop site. In the UK, 165,000 people search for ‘Coke’ on their mobiles every month. Is the brand really maximising its Olympic opportunity on mobile?

While Coke focuses on mobile applications, while the other brands do the same as well, they just miss the opportunity for the search and the website (mobile optimsied site impacts search rankings). It is very interesting phenomenon - while people focus on the hardest things they just forget about the simplest things - it is the same with the students (while we expect something UNREAL to come up on the exam, when we see the easssyyy question..well.. we just dont expect easy questions) and it is the same with the mobile - while everyone focuses on social, applications, qr codes and augmented reality brand simply forget about the formers - website and the email.  Huge number of brands are wasting a lot of effort and missing out on conversions simply because they haven’t optimised their emails for mobile.

Isn't it annoying when u search the web not find some basic (like travel) websites being optimised for mobile? Well, I normally search for flights or a holiday when on the train and I normally find it annoying that Ryanair does not offer mobile optimised website version.

When everyone says the mobile is the new thing brands should be first to re-focus their strategies and instead of doing 'mobile' as an addition to the other comms tools combine all of them!