There’s an interesting article on Business Insider which suggests Google has a huge problem with declining revenues from pay per click advertising. They suggest that since Google started displaying the same ads on mobiles as they do on desktops conversion rates have dropped triggering a lower bid price from advertisers.
Whilst it’s unlikely that you care about Google’s revenues, you should be worried about what’s causing it. The supposition is that as Google told advertisers that they didn’t need to create specific campaigns for mobile retailers send both mobile and desktop traffic to the same sites. It’s suggested that most retailers are still using the same online stores for both mobile and desktop traffic from Google adverts and these websites were never made mobile friendly.
Having an mobile unfriendly website results in less conversions and subsequently advertisers naturally lowered their bids on adverts as conversions no longer justified the high spend.
Of course you shouldn’t be tailoring your business to help Google, but what this does tell us that if you’ve still not got a mobile optimised website it’s probably hurting your business too. There’s no point driving traffic to a store if people immediately leave and go off to shop somewhere else.
It does of course explain why marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon have invested so much in mobile apps and mobile optimised versions of their websites. What about you however? Is your website optimised for mobile traffic and are you still spending on Google ads driving traffic from mobiles and seeing a lower click through rate?
One Response
If your website is not mobile friendly google search spiders will in future no longer enter it. If you rely on google organic search for traffic good idea to check your ranking over the next few weeks. if you find it sliding then it is probably down to limited or non existant mobile capabilities. Had a recent bulletin from my eccomerce software company on this subject. Their software automatically detects the source and modifies the site accordingly so not an issue for me but if your software has no mobile capabilities then you will definitely drop off the radar in search.