Google is Evil: Your PPC Campaigns opt in Mobile Search Network by Default starting November 19, 2007
According to Clikz's post Google Ports AdWords Listings to Its Mobile Search Product: "Google will run listings free on Google Mobile Search pages through November 18. As of November 19, SEM buyers will have to opt out through the campaign summary page or pay for mobile clicks. While it is said ads will run across both the Web and mobile platforms, an e-mail sent to AdWords customers indicated that only ads with landing pages adaptable to mobile handsets will qualify for disbursement to the mobile search product." Here's the FAQ from Google.
Although it sounds good to unify your mobile and regular search engine PPC campaigns, this Google change is evil because Google opts your campaigns in mobile search network by default. An advertiser will have to opt out explicitly. Google gets the most benefit(money) cause they can serve more ads even many advertisers may not be ready for running PPC campaigns on mobile web. I highly doubt one can just uses the same PPC campaigns on both search and mobile networks.
PPC campaign on mobile phone is a whole different ball game because users on a mobile phone are on the go and usually have different objectives than they do when browsing on a PC/laptop. For example, they usually look for information related to their current location, such as restaurant, shopping info. If you don't geo-target your campaigns, you may be getting lots of irrelevant clicks.
If you use 3rd-party conversion tracking instead of Google's, be really careful because conversion tracking is very different on a regular browser and a mobile phone browser. According to the post "How To Optimize Your Mobile Website For Search": "Not all phones support cookies, those that do can still fail as not all carrier gateways pass the cookie information properly, most phones do not handle Javascript, login and session tracking across a wide spectrum of devices can be challenging due to device-specific idiosyncrasies when it comes to URL length and caching, the list goes on."
On a related note: before running any mobile PPC campaign, you also need to ensure your web analytic software understands mobile web so that you can have good visibility in mobile web traffic.
You'd better be prepared for running PPC campaigns on mobile web. Otherwise, you'd lose track of your money and your traffic! So opt out of Google's mobile network first. Join in only when you are ready.
