Like desktop ad strategies, mobile ad strategies can run the gamut from very simple to very intricate. Also, it is important to acknowledge that not all ad strategies need to be mobile or desktop‐specific—in fact, they often shouldn’t be. If you have a responsive design website, for example, you may not need to create separate campaigns for the separate devices. The best way to decide what mobile advertising option will be the most effective for you is to start with the goals and the mobile assets that you have to support the ad campaign and then work backward from there. Often simply altering the ad copy, creative, or landing pages, and adjusting the percent to target for mobile can do the trick. This is easier than completely segmenting campaigns, which sometimes is not even possible. For instance, you can consider the following based on your key mobile assets.
Website Only
If you have a mobile‐friendly, responsive design website where your top conversion or engagement activity can take place, then nearly every type of traditional ad network could be used to drive mobile traffic to the website. Website banners, retargeting campaigns, PPC ads, video and YouTube ads, and social media ads can all generally be targeted at mobile users to some degree. If you want, you should also be able to place ads in apps, and clicks from the apps will launch a browser to open the landing page on your website, meaning you can generate traffic from apps even if you don’t have an app.
When mobile ads are designed to take a user to a mobile‐friendly or responsive design website, the potential goals to be as wide‐ranging as they are on desktop; anything from awareness campaigns to micro‐targeted conversion campaigns should work, as long as all of the necessary assets on the path to conversion are mobile‐friendly. This includes the ad imagery or ad copy as well as the ad landing page and all of the utilities and forms through the end of conversion, including follow‐up emails and other subsequent communication. It is especially critical that any forms or pages related to the sign‐up, registration, or purchase process be tested extensively on mobile. If the conversion is a download, a calendar invite, or something similar, it will also be important to send the link to the asset in an email in case the user initiates the conversion on a mobile device but intends for the final consumption of the asset to take place on a different device, like a computer or tablet.
When you are testing your ads and landing pages for mobile friendliness, it is important to test on multiple devices and in multiple mobile browsers. You can do this on free digital emulators like the ones offered by MobileMoxie, but you should also test on real devices to ensure that there are no problems or conversion limitations in the process. This means testing on Android and iOS devices, but you should also text in the mobile versions of Safari, Chrome, and Opera. You may also want to test on the mobile versions of Firefox, Edge, and the Samsung Internet mobile browsers. Note that a browser that is built for iOS may have slight differences from the same browser that is built for Android. If your target market is young or likely to be interested in gaming, or if you are promoting a mobile game, it may also be relevant to test your mobile advertising assets on handheld Nintendo Switch and PlayStation devices.
The points that determine which styling is used in a responsive design are called breakpoints, and one page template can have many breakpoints to accommodate many different ranges of screen widths. This is what allows a page that works well on a desktop rendering of a website to also work well on a mobile device, without having to be built multiple times. If things in your ads or landing pages are not lining up properly on certain screen sizes, it is usually because a new screen width specification (called a breakpoint) needs to be built into the page. You can read more about this in the mobile website section of this chapter.
App Only
If you have a mobile app, then many of the same options will be available, with one additional complication. You need a way to know if the potential customer is using an Android or iOS device when viewing the ad, and ideally you also want to know if that user already has the app installed. There are mechanisms for this, and they are sometimes built into the ad networks, but they are not always reliable. This can get somewhat technical, so if you don’t have strong support from a tech team, nuanced advertising options could be a frustrating option.
If your technical options are limited, but you have an app that you want to advertise, the best path forward is to focus your ads in the realm of apps rather than relying on web‐to‐app advertising options. This works well because, when you place an ad in an iOS app or the Apple AppStore, you can safely assume that the potential customer is on an iOS device, and the same can be true for Android. With knowledge of the operating system in hand, you can then more easily segment your marketing for customers with and without the app already installed. For instance, you could target people without the app with a message about downloading the app and target people with the app installed about specific conversions or engagement opportunities within the app. The same is true on Android and the Google Play app store.
If all you are trying to do is drive app downloads, the first thing to think about is using the in‐store PPC options. The App Store and Google Play both allow you to purchase ads directly in the store. In these advertising models, you identify keyword searches that are related to your app and set a price that you are willing to pay for clicks when the platform shows your ad to people who search for that keyword. It is important to understand that different rules apply between the two app platforms, and those rules are also different from the rules that apply in Google AdWords. In some cases, those differences can be used to your advantage. Specifically, it is important to understand that Google AdWords does not let you bid on your competitors’ trademarked terms, but both of the app stores do. This is why, for example, you can search for the Amazon app and see that the top paid result is from their competitor, eBay, or you can search for Facebook, and the top ad will be from their competitor, LinkedIn. This means that a very simple strategy for increasing downloads is to bid on all of the names of your competitive apps.
If your goal is to target existing app users with your ad campaign, then there is only value in the app store ads if the action that you are targeting is the download of a subsequent, companion app, such as a premium version of the app or an add‐on, or if you are trying to achieve downloads of the same companion app on a different device, such as a watch or tablet version of the app. If none of these scenarios apply and you want to target existing app users with more specific ads that drive the app users toward in‐app purchases or deeper in‐app engagement, then a different type of ad is needed.
This is true for iOS and Android, though iPhone users can actually browse in‐app purchases directly on the app store and start a purchase even before downloading your app. While it is possible, it is not common, so if your goal is to drive in‐app purchases, the best way to proceed is usually to work with an app ad network like Tapjoy or InMobi, described earlier in this chapter.
Website and App
If you have an app and a website, then you have a lot of options, and the trick is just making sure that you are segmenting your ads and messaging correctly and testing all of your scenarios to ensure that the ads are working as expected for all of the users and potential use cases. One of the best options for making this possible is to use deep linking to join the screens in your app to the corresponding pages on your website. Obviously, this is easiest if the two assets were developed together, with the intent that at least some content and interactivity in one asset will be replicated in the other. If this is not the case, and the interactivity and use cases between the app and the website are different, this will complicate the implementation of the ad campaigns and will make accurate targeting more critical for success.
The nice thing about deep links is that they can allow devices with and without the app to interact seamlessly, even if, for example, a link is shared from someone with the app on iPhone to other people with and without the app on Android devices. When the deep link is requested by either operating system (assuming that deep links have been set up for both), then the operating system will automatically check to see if the app is installed. If it is, the app will open directly to the specific screen in the app that is being requested. If the app is not installed, the system will simply open the corresponding version of that page on the website. All of the information is contained in the deep link.
If the deep links are taken a step further and they are used to initiate app indexing, then the deep links can be indexed by Apple and Google search engines. When a link is clicked from one of the search engines, the same process of checking for the installed app and opening to a specific screen or failing over to the corresponding web experience can take place. Deep links can even be included in emails and other marketing links, especially if you have a heavily engaged app audience, or if the app is likely their primary interaction with your brand, such as with companies like Facebook, Uber, and Twitter. While they can sometimes be frustrating to set up, if deep links are well integrated for iOS and Android, they can make it easy for users to share mobile content across different mobile devices, without needing to know what operating system users are on or if the app is installed.
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