Most people who play tennis have more confidence and success in their forehand strokes than in their backhands. Some players are blessed with a good backhand, but the rest of us generally prefer to hit a forehand. In some cases when a backhand is warranted, players can “run around” a backhand by running a few extra steps and hitting a forehand. The shot they are most comfortable with. They stay in their comfort zone, and never end up developing a good backhand as a result.
Web designers face a similar situation with Mobile design. Most of us have built our sites for the first generation web users – and desktop design was our comfort zone. While we think about mobile, it has not made it to top priority status. One technique available to “run around” mobile was to design your Google AdWords campaigns around traditional desktop functionality, and opt out of the mobile versions of these campaigns. This ability to dismiss one device type and market solely is on the way out for AdWords as a result of a recent announcement by Google. An article from BusinessInsider.com explaining these changes is linked here.
Important to note from the article: “ . . . it won’t be possible to run strictly mobile-only campaigns in the future. Instead, all campaigns will run on both desktop and mobile, according to a weighting factor set by advertisers. (You can weight desktop or mobile ads very low or very high, but there’s no option for true mobile-only campaigns.) Google will “upgrade” campaigns previously created as mobile- or desktop-only to run across all devices.”
For those who have not “embraced” mobile yet, this means your campaigns will not be “device agnostic” – appearing on all searches regardless of the device type. So if you are not optimized for mobile, you will be paying for mobile device clicks even when your site is not mobile friendly. Quick translation: Wasting your money!
So what can you do? You can start down the path of responsive design. That will be the topic of our next blog post. Stay tuned!