Over the years, many businesses have built mobile sites, enabled m-commerce and even introduced features such as “order online, pick up at store.” But, arguably, few have the resources to track the emerging mobile paths and fully tap fast-changing consumer behaviour as the mobile creates new paths to commerce.
Not even the all-knowing Google fully understands the myriads ways in which mobiles work.
Enter GoMo, the Internet giant’s latest initiative to gain a 360° view of the mobile world. To do so, Google is enlisting the support, predominantly, of small businesses that have yet to capture businesses from users on the go.
“Mobility has forever changed the way consumers live and shop, giving rise to these new customer paths as the lines between digital and physical experiences blur,” Soyeon Kim, a member of Google’s APAC Mobile Marketing Team, wrote in a blog post to announce the GoMo program.
“Understanding what each of these mobile pathways means for your business is a critical piece of the larger attribution challenge that every marketer needs to meet head-on. This requires thinking about the full customer journey and acknowledging the interplay between various devices, channels and media influences along the way,” he added.
The new norm
This new consumer behaviour is going to be the norm, Google asserts, besides citing a recent study from the U.S. that revealed a high 30% of mobile searches lead to store visits, calls or an online purchase.
But, this norm is not easy to manage for most businesses. Google cites adidas’ success, in partnership with its agency iProspect. The German maker of athletic gear apparently “created a simple yet powerful attribution model to understand how mobile is driving customers into stores.”
As a result, it discovered that “each click on their store locator button was worth $3.20, which has changed the way they view their digital investment.” Check out adidas’ full case study here.
Google’s engine captures some knowledge of mobile use we already possess into five neat categories. For example, consumers use search to find physical stores or mobile sites; many use mobile apps to do even more, many still simply use the call feature to find stores; and finally, many use the mobile to identify products they want to buy eventually on a more secure, or easier-to-use, device like a PC or even a tablet.
Integral to Google’s offering is a full value mobile calculator that analyses businesses’ data and delivers a neat estimate of the value that mobile brings to their overall business. It uses equations and benchmarks to help businesses estimate value by studying calls, apps, in-store, mobile site and cross-device transactions.
Google says businesses can estimate their Full Value of Mobile by simply following the step-by-step wizard to upload data from AdWords and your mobile website, besides making some key assumptions. This 30-minute exercise, it says, will help you “see the total value, value per click, and ROI that mobile is driving for your business across all mobile customer paths, not just your mobile website. You’ll also see how cost-effective your mobile CPAs are.”
So, what’s in it for Google?
With GoMo, Google will drive its hugely lucrative AdWords business into the mobile arena, besides aggregating humungous data from millions of businesses on user behaviour.
