Google Announces Mobile-First Changes

Last night, at its Performance Summit in San Francisco, Google announced that advertisers would soon be able to make individual bids for Google AdWords for desktop, tablet and mobile. This is in response to internet usage trends globally. According to Google, they now handle trillions of searches, up from 100’s of billion very recently. Over half of these searches start on a mobile device.

It’s not news that mobile usage has been growing. As Sridhar Ramaswamy, the head of Google says “it’s not an evolution, it’s a revolution.” So, what Google has announced is not just device specific bidding, but now advertisers can use mobile bidding as the base, making bid adjustments for mobile and desktop. This makes mobile advertising the baseline for those who have already made the shift.

mobile changes chart

In line with this change will be big changes for business-especially in the way Google Ads are displayed. They will be much more prominent. For starters, the character count of the headline will go up from one 25-character headline to two 30-character headlines, and the description line will go up from two 35-character descriptions to a single 80-character description. This will enable better-written ad copy, rather than a few phrases strung together. It will also unify the experience for users across devices.

So what does that mean for advertisers and businesses? It’s not enough to accommodate mobile searches in your marketing plan. You have to start thinking ‘Mobile First’. The changes made by Google will now allow advertisers to make individual, device-specific bids for AdWords. So businesses can now allocate their marketing dollars based on the device share of their audience. Keep watching that device break-up for your audience. You can expect mobile to consistently grow.

While you start making the shift to the ‘Mobile-First’ world, remember that a typical browsing session is only 70 seconds long, and it’s important to understand customer intent. Can you cash in on the key moments? It is speed-dating and you don’t have much time to make an impression.