New in AdWords: More Control to Target iPhone Users & Other Mobile Devices with a Full Browser

Innovations / December 05, 2008

Today we noticed a new feature in our clients’ AdWords accounts – the ability to choose if you want to display ads on mobile devices with full internet browser capability like the iPhone. Essentially this applies only to devices that have the ability to display websites similarly to how you would see them on your desktop or laptop and are not to be confused with mobile format ads.

Google puts it like this “These settings do not apply to mobile format ads. Ads in the mobile ad format always show on traditional mobile devices only, regardless of your choices here.”

You’ll find this new feature in your campaign settings page for which you are “opted in by default”.

Here’s a screenshot:

We did find mention of this new feature on Search Engine Roundtable and the Search Engine Watch Forum.

Our reps at Google explained that this feature was launched on the 3rd of this month and the idea is to expand the reach of AdWords ads to mobile devices that can display websites that were designed for desktop and laptop displays such as the iPhone.

They also mentioned that this new setting is turned on by default so advertisers will have to manually opt out of it if they want to.

Quality Score is Impacted So Be Vigilant

You might definitely want to opt out or test this new feature further as your CTR and consequently quality score will be impacted by this update. Given that user intent on such devices as the iPhone might be different from users searching on their laptops and desktops (think less involved searchers that are not as research intense), you will definitely want to pay close attention to this update.

Some industries and niches might find that mobile devices perform well for their AdWords campaigns while others might discover that CTR is way too low on these devices and therefore not the right venue for their ads.

How To Test Performance

The recommended best practice at this point is to split up your campaigns – one opted into device platform targeting and one opted out of it. Currently this is the only way to measure performance of your campaigns on mobile devices that offer full browser capabilities. As it stands, you can’t see performance split up by device platform on either the AdWords interface, AdWords editor nor any of the reports.

Splitting your campaigns this way will allow you to tailor your keywords, ads and landing pages to target these mobile users differently for greater results.

Learn more about this new feature here.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and comments on this new feature. Is it working out for you or not really?

Update (Dec 8): Google just posted an entry on the Inside AdWords blog announcing this feature which allows you to extend your AdWords Campaigns to the G1 (Android) and iPhone.