decision choices: Search for Anything, Anywhere

Posted by Katherine Gaskins in CyberMonday, Mobile Advertising

Mobile.

LATE BREAKING:  Popular restaurant app Urbanspoon is releasing new data today related to its growth over the course of 2011. The company says its traffic is up by 80%, with mobile growth outpacing the web. The site is now seeing 28 million visits per month, with traffic now split roughly half and half between mobile and web. From TechCrunch.com

  You’ve got to face it, talking about PC online interactivity is already passé. Remember when laptops  were considered personal computers for mobile use? User behavior (& the market) is shifting from laptops to tablets to cell phones as the nerve centers (brains) of virtual interactivity. Motorola Atrix 4G, the Droid Bionic, &  Apple’s iPhone 4S already have dual core processors, which can be synched with your computer or laptop &, in December, Nvidia announced its first quad-core processor for tablets and smartphones, the Tegra 3.

Motorola Atrix 4G portable dock station

Mobile=Portable.

While IBM holds the first patent (1982) for “pluggable terminal architecture” & Symbol Technologies, Inc. (2009) & Apple (2010) the first patents for “docking station for hand held electronic devices”, Motorola was the first to offer a portable multi-media docking port, to which you can simply connect a keyboard & monitor. That is, your phone is now your computer (CPU)! Parenthetically, Motorola offers a car mount, so that you can use the Atrix 4G voice-enabled search & dial, get real-time traffic information, & turn-by-turn navigation from Google Maps navigation & even connect with your car stereo, safely, without your hands.

Motorola Atrix 4G car mount

Why all this smartphone/mobile talk?

Call me a couch potato, but while most people will be holiday shopping at the mall, I’ll be at home making purchases with my trusty iPhone. -Tom Kaneshige, senior online writer, CIO, in Black Friday or Smartphone Shopping?

Mobile searches have quadrupled in the last year &, for many items, 1 in 7 searches are now mobile & 1 in 3 are local.

According to IBM’s CyberMonday 2011 Coremetrics Benchmark Report: <click on Cyber Monday>

• 2011 U.S. CyberMonday online retail growth increased 33% compared to 2010
• the average order value was up 2.6%, from $193.24 to $198.26
• 10.8 percent of people used a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site, up from 3.9 percent in 2010
• mobile sales grew dramatically, reaching 6.6 percent on CyberMonday versus 2.3 percent in 2010

Compared to Black Friday, on Cyber Monday 2011:

• online sales were up 29.3 percent over Black Friday
• mobile traffic averaged 10.8 percent compared to 14.3 percent on Black Friday
• consumer sales on mobile devices reached 6.6 percent versus 9.8 percent on Black Friday
• shoppers using the iPad also continued to drive more retail purchases than any other device, with conversion rates reaching 5.2% compared to 4.6 %
• shoppers referred from Social Networks generated 0.56 percent of all online sales on CyberMonday versus 0.53 percent on Black Friday; similar to Black Friday, Facebook led the pack, accounting for 86% of all social media traffic

Only 79 percent of large online advertisers have a mobile optimized site. Yet, Google’s 70% share of the mobile search & advertising market totaled $2.5BN in 2011.

Why is this important to businesses,  SEO & SMMS professionals?

From USA Today

After looking up a local business on their smartphones, 61 percent of users call the business and 59 percent visit.Seventy-nine percent of smartphone users use their smartphones to help with shopping According to a Google/IPSOS survey of the US consumer Mobile Movement, published in April 2011, some 71 percent of smartphone users who see TV, watch the press or watch an online ad, do a mobile search for more information. Of people who react to seeing a mobile ad:

• 42% click on the mobile ad
• 35% visit the advertiser’s site
• 32 % search for more information on their phone
• 49% make a purchase, and
• 27% call the business.

How does this relate to SEO, social marketing & Google+?

Google adwords SEO (search engine optimization)—and similar programs—are only now gaining inroads as a driving force in corporate marketing consciousness, particularly small business consciousness. Yet, mobile technology, availability, & use by consumers is already 3 to 5 years ahead of corporate & small business mindsets. According to an Adobe survey of 1,200 U.S. mostly smartphone users, U.S. consumers prefer browser to apps for most mobile activities.  Accessing maps and directions (81%)  is the no. 1 mobile activity, followed by

• social networking (76%)
• accessing local information (73%)
• reading news (68%)
• music (63%) &
• taking & sharing photos, 52%.

According to Google’s Fast Facts:

• 39% use the Internet on their smartphones while going to the bathroom
• 70% have used their smartphones while shopping in-store
• 88% of people looking for local information have taken action within a day
• 82% of smartphone users notice mobile ads

Make your world:

No Mobile Site? You don’t exist.

If your mobile website is not already in development, you’re going to be way behind. With 1 in 7 searches now mobile & 1 in 3 of those searches now local, YOU, your campaign, brand, and identity are not going to be accessible to the way your consumers search &, effectively, as far as the consumer is concerned, you’ll be closed for business or won’t exist (paraphrase of Jason Spero, Head of Google Mobile Apps).  .

About Katherine Gaskins

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