Tag Archive for: mobile

Facebook Mobile Ads: A Growing Trend

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Facebook mobile has allowed ads for less than a year, but they’ve put a lot of effort into making it an effective platform. Now they are seeing the benefits of that, as 20% of the ad buys on Facebook are for the mobile format.

The price of the mobile ads are significantly higher than their desktop counterpart, but they are worth it considering their higher visibility due to mobile showing only one ad at a time.

Head over to TechCrunch to check out the full story on the growing platform of Facebook’s mobile ads. If you haven’t already gotten started, you may want to consider allocating some of your ad budget there.

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What Is The Device-Agnostic Approach To Design?

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If you look at the tags for most articles on responsive design, you will notice the way most writers connect responsive design to mobile design. Thinking of responsive design as a mobile design method kind of misses the point however.

When Ethan Marcotte first coined the term ‘responsive design’, he wrote, “responsive design is not about ‘designing for mobile’. But it’s not about ‘designing for the desktop’, either. Rather, it’s about adopting a more flexible, device-agnostic approach to designing for the web.”

So what exactly is device-agnosticism? It is the main selling point of responsive design. The device-agnostic approach to design is designing for every device at the same time, or focusing on no specific device. PC Magazine defines it simply as saying the approach is “not tied to a particular device.”

I won’t say more about the benefits of thinking agnostically about devices, as it is already covered in just about every article I’ve done about responsive design. But, what I will say is I made the same mistake many have by slipping responsive design under the idea of mobile design. Thinking that way still focuses on the needs of devices. Instead, as Sarita Harbour from Web Designer Depot, explains, you should stop thinking about the needs of devices, and start thinking about the needs of the consumer. Isn’t that what is most important anyways?

 

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Left Nav Flyouts Don’t Work, Please Stop Using Them

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Mobile navigation can be difficult because you are forced to condense everything your site or app offers into a simple list or set of buttons. For the iPhone, three naviagational patterns rose up that are fairly good solutions to the problems of mobile navigation. You have the tab bar, the table view (like Messages or Mail), and the card stack, like what you find in Weather.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t designers trying other navigational solutions. Some of the more experimental ways to move around apps and sites work great, but there are some that just don’t work. Facebook’s mobile left nav flyout pattern is a perfect example of a mobile navigation system that should be gotten rid of.

Brent Jackson agrees that Facebook’s navigation system needs to be replaced, and argues why on his Tumblr page. More than anything, the issue I have with the system is it hides a lot of the functionality the app offers under small, hard to tap buttons.

As Jackson points out, the left nav flyout is also innefficient. While normally you have a small set of buttons always available to help you get where you want to be, Facebook makes you continuously wait for new lists or areas of the app to load. It becomes very tedious to do anything except look at the News Feed.

If you can think of times when a lefy nav flyout works, I’m all ears. There are none that work for me, or wouldn’t benefit from another site navigation system.

 

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New AdWords Tool Helps You Reach Tablet Users

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The reality of online marketing is that advertisers must find a way to reach users on a variety of different devices. AdWords recently made that difficult task a little easier with a new tool that allows you to convert ads using Flash to HTML5.

Since many tablets do not support Flash, this tool could help your business reach thousands of additional users. And converting takes just a couple of mouse clicks, no expert knowledge is needed.

To find out more, check out Chris Crum’s article at Web Pro News.

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Get To Know The Latest Trends in Mobile Search

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With every new bit of analysis that comes out, it becomes more and more clear how quickly mobile browsing is becoming a huge source of search traffic. One study shows that up to 25-30% of all paid search traffic now comes from mobile devices. Here we will explore the latest trends in mobile browsing that search marketers should know.

Tablets Have a Much Higher ROI Than Desktops

The cost per click (CPC) of any ad is supposed to be proportional to the return on the investment (ROI). That seems like common marketing logic. However, it seems the web market is not so logical.

Smart phones have a lower cost per click because they do not convert as well as desktops. Because of this, the ROI from smartphones or desktops are about equal. According to Siddharth Shah from Search Engine Land however, the CPC for tablets is currently 30% lower, even though they have a 20% higher conversion rate than desktops. That means the ROI from tablets is actualy 70% more than desktops. This is a huge opening for search marketers.

ROIs Vary Significantly By Mobile Device

Because of different demographics, user experiences, and varying contexts different devices offer, the ROI for different mobile devices vary significantly. For example, the most current data suggests the ROI from iOS users is roughly double that of Android users. When creating marketing campaigns, be specific to what devices you are marketing to, especially designating between tablet and smartphone. Being specific with who you are marketing will allow you to get the highest ROI possible for your market.

Mobile browsing has no sign of stopping as new and cheaper devices are being offered every day for consumers. Nearly everyone now has a smartphone, and tablets are becoming more and more common. The market will only be more important in the future.

 

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SEO for Siri [Infographic]

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When Siri was announced with the iPhone 4S, it didn’t bring about a revolution in search activity on phones. Most still search by typing keywords into Safari or Chrome. However, gradually, Siri and mobile apps are changing search habits and creating new opportunities for search marketers.

The Alchemy Viral crew gives us an infographic which helps cover everything about searching with Siri and mobile searching in general.

There is one error, which Search Engine Land helps point out. The infographic says Siri draws from social services, but Siri can only help users post things to Twitter or Facebook. It can’t help them get information back from those social sites.

With mobile searching poised to overtake desktop within two years, this infographic can be helpful to anyone interested in mobile searching.

Oh, and the creator of the infographic isn’t bad with spelling. They are just British, hence “optimisation,” instead of the American spelling.

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‘Cachetown’ Makes Your World A Video Game

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Imagine being able to point your phone’s camera down a normal city street and see a video game type environment complete with puzzle boxes and coins up for grabs. That’s the reality that a San Diego based start-up, called Cachetown, hopes to bring to fruition.

The positive spin here is that once you’ve created interactive games for people to play, you can add in an advertising angle and use this “augmented reality” to offer deals and promotions for stores on the other side of a user’s lens. Maybe you point your phone at a restaraunt and see an opportunity to get half off your next meal.

Tom Cheredar has more at this story at VentureBeat, including a commercial produced by Cachetown. The most interesting thing about the video is that it even seems to realize the one, looming drawback to this technology. No one wants to walk around the streets looking at their phone. Whether it’s a reluctance to look like a tourist, holding up your phone in your own town or a fear of walking into a bevy of obstacles, most people would likely be reluctant to fully embrace Cachetown’s current model.

The idea is sound, however, and could have some interesting implementations coming very soon.

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Facebook Mobile Ads Are a Huge Hit

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Facebook recently gave advertisers the option of where to place their ads. The options, including desktop newsfeed and sidebar, desktop newsfeed only or mobile newsfeed, create many possibilities, but the best value has quickly become evident. For the highest click-through-rate and second highest conversion rate, John Constine, of TechCrunch, reports using those dollars on mobile ads is the way to go.

CEO of BLiNQ Media, Dave Williams, says their numbers suggest “that mobile beats desktop placement by a 3 to 1 ratio.”

The one drawback is a positive for users. Facebook limits the number of ads for mobile users in order to keep their experience enjoyable. This means advertisers won’t be able to overload any group with their ads. So, those advertisers will have to be more clever in how they gameplan.

Also, companies are finding that mobile users that ‘Like’ their page are “worth” less than their desktop counterparts. This is because the mobile users are less likely to view photos and videos and also because desktop users are generally more active on a company’s page since they may have to do more work to seek them out.

Though fans of a business’s page only see about 16-percent of their posts on average, Facebook certainly seems to be worth the effort. Once a company has gained that ‘Like’, they are essentially marketing to interested consumers for free.

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Study Finds Students And Phones Joined at the Hip

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A recent study on the way youths around the world use mobile devices found that college students use their phones to text and interact over social media much more than any other use, such as surfing the web or gaming. The study, conducted by Prof. Paul Mihailidis of Emerson College in Boston, tracked 800 students of 52 nationalities attending universities in eight countries across three continents for a 24-hour period.

As Susan Moeller reports for Huffington Post, Mihailidis made five key conclusions:

  1. Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms are the dominant form of communication and new sharing.
  2. The content that is most shared is not thought-provoking articles, but rather viral videos and music.
  3. There is an addiction to mobile phones and these phones are tied in to a student’s identitiy.
  4. Connecting with friends online through a mobile device has become “more real than the real world.”
  5. Students demand a large number of options when it comes to apps, but only utilize a select few.

The upside to the study’s findings is that these mobile devices allow students to comment and share content more readily, making them better informed and feel more a part of issues.

The downside, of course, is the issue of privacy. With so much of a student’s life online, there’s a significant risk that somone other than a friend could collect and use their information.

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Kids Today: Students Prefer Online Interaction

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The affect of social media and mobile phones on society, especially the nation’s youths, has become discussed at length. The claims being that social interaction online and through texting isn’t the same as real-world interaction. Who better to tackle this issue than a current student? Dakota Castets-Didier, a student at Boise State, published an article for The Arbiter agreeing that “social media is killing intimacy.”

One cannot walk across a college campus without seeing the affect that smartphones have had. However, instead of observing how today’s darn kids don’t know how to interact with each other in a traditional way, observe how interacting with each other has evolved.

For the college aged, it’s no longer socially acceptable to call friends to plan an activity. Texting is viewed as simpler and less invasive. It’s even more acceptable to ask for a first date via text than it is over the phone. Some even argue that breaking up over text is perfectly acceptable.

Students are embracing the relative anonymity of online interaction. So much so, that they’ve become increasingly more nervous when addressing crowds of peers in person. Some studies have even pointed to the immediacy of texting and social media to explain shorter attention spans in today’s youths.

While the ability to interact with friends and family anytime, anywhere, is a powerful and useful tool, it comes with a price. We have sacraficed the intimacy and comfort of face to face interaction.

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