Earlier this week Google announced the Full Value of Mobile Initiative. As Google puts it, people take a variety of online and offline actions on their smartphones, including calling a business, downloading an app, looking for directions to a store, or starting research about products/services that lead to a purchase on another device. But marketers do still not completely understand the customer paths of mobile sales. Google’s new initiative should help marketers to begin this discussion and also help them to better understand mobile’s impact online and offline. The new initiative includes:
- A calculator tool
- Videos that illustrate each mobile conversion path
- Case studies highlighting successful mobile strategies
- Tips for measurement
The Full Value of Mobile Calculator uses simple equations and benchmarks that can help you in estimating the value of mobile for your business, be it through calls, apps, in-store, mobile site and cross-device. Following the step-by-step wizard takes about 30 minutes as it includes uploading data from your AdWords account and your mobile website as well as making key assumptions to configure your Full Value of Mobile estimate. As a result, this tool can show you the total value, value per click, and ROI of mobile for your business across all mobile customer paths. Moreover, it will tell you how cost-effective your mobile CPAs are.
This all sounds great in theory, but how can the average advertiser use it?
Once you decide to use the tool, the first screen you see is the following.
This gives you the option to start wherever you want without having to stick to a strict process. Once you decided where you want to begin your Full Value of Mobile journey and clicked on one of the five options, it highlights the option and gives you a short overview of what it entails.
You can also watch a short video or just go straight to the calculator. Clicking on “go to the calculator” button brings you yet to another overview screen:
This screen gives you a short introduction to the tool as well as the options of manually entering information or uploading a Google Click Type Report. However, both options hint to walk through the calculator first before starting to see what other information the user will need to gather.
Once decided on the path you want to take, the tool tells you exactly on how to get the data in your AdWords account and upload it to the tool.
Next just upload your report to the tool (select browse and the file name that you saved your report under) and start calculating.
While uploading the Click Type Report makes it easy on the user, as the tool will take over the calculation for you, trying to go through the calculator manually is still cumbersome. This is due to the fact that you have to know the exact numbers of mobile related actions users take on your site in order to be able to base your decisions on the outcome of the calculator. For example, you need to know the click numbers, percentage of calls, the percentage of these calls that resulted in a purchase as well as the average dollar mount of these purchases. With most advertisers not having a mobile optimized site yet, I wonder how many of them will be able to know the exact numbers for this calculation. Nevertheless, once you have completed all the options that you want, you can save your numbers for each option as well as view the summary at any point. When you decide to view your summary, you will get to this page:
A few things worth mentioning:
As of this morning our team had problems to upload a Google Click Type report to the calculator tools. All of us who tried, were getting the same error. So be aware that there might be a problem on Google’s end. Once you are able to upload this report to the tool, you will also be able to view ROI from Ads and CPA from Ads data. The Value of Ads screen will be viewable although you only might have entered your data manually. Moreover, there is no button in the interface to upload a Google Click Type report at any time. I had a few problems getting to this point after visiting the tool a few times. Also, the calculator can only save one session at a time. So you might want to export your report as a pdf to make sure you are not losing any data.
The last step in getting the Full Value of Mobile for your business is the following screen:
Again, the more details you know about your mobile traffic the better. Let us know what you think about the new tool and how you think it can help your business!
