“T’was the night before Christmas, when all through the house,
not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.” - Clement Clarke Moore

This traditional poem evokes memories of warm fireplaces, stockings hanging from the mantelpiece, a decorated tree and gifts piled high.

Fast forward to 2014, and in a world of ‘Black Fridays’ and ‘Cyber Mondays’ the only mouse likely to stir is that of a computer mouse.

And these days it is stirring for a far different reason - the growth of mobile and tablet use.

After a recent slump, e-commerce is back on the rise again. A post by Capgemini quoting Tina Spooner, Chief Information Officer at IMRG, revealed that:

“E-retailers appear to be more confident in their growth predictions for the fourth quarter, shoppers are spending more per online transaction than last year and our latest research reveals almost half of consumers will order gifts online less than a week before Christmas Day.”

In a study carried out by eMarketer, more than 80% of the UK population use a mobile phone regularly. It may come as no surprise that 100% of these people fall into the 18-54 age range. Key demographics I am sure.

A poll conducted by Intelligent Positioning found that John Lewis received 75% of its traffic from mobile and tablet users on Christmas Day 2013.

The stats clearly illustrate that tablet and mobile use is increasing and desktop use is decreasing rapidly.

Consumers are now using mobile devices to not only make purchases, but find stores, research products, compare prices and read reviews. According to Google, “93% of people who used mobile to research go on to make a purchase.”

Whether you are a PPC account manager or a business owner, it would be foolish to ignore this huge opportunity to take advantage of this behaviour and turn it into valuable site traffic.

So what can you do?

Here are a few items to consider when creating your mobile PPC strategy this Christmas:

Use mobile preferred ads

This might seem obvious, however, you would be surprised at how many accounts are not utilising this feature. I would recommend testing at least two mobile preferred ads against two desktop ads.

Format ads for mobiles

Ensure all important information and call to actions are in the headline and description line one. Description line two may not be shown on mobile devices in some instances (such as when it isn’t expected to perform better than your mobile-relevant extensions).

Measure the full value of mobile

Take into account the different conversions that a mobile user could generate for your business (e.g. converted clicks on your site, cross-device conversions, calls as conversions, website call conversions). Onsite conversions are just one part of a mobile user’s potential experience with your brand.

Use mobile bid modifiers

In the days before enhanced campaigns, mobile could be separated into its own campaign and keywords could have separate bids applied to them.

However, in this multi-device world, you can modify your keyword bids to determine how aggressive/passive you would like to be on mobile devices. You can choose to increase your bid by +300% or even decrease by 100% if you do not wish your keywords to appear on mobile devices.

Ensure your landing pages are optimised for mobile

Incredibly, 57% of mobile customers will abandon your site if they have to wait three seconds for a page to load and an increase of 100ms in the load time leads to a 1% sales decrease!

Imagine you are a potential customer visiting your mobile site and ask yourself:

• Does the site load quickly?
• Is the content easy to read and navigable?
• Is the call to action clear?

Once you have got your answers, you can then look at improving and optimising your site for mobile.