Mobile advertising is “doing very well” for Google, according to the firm’s vice president of product management, Susan Wojcicki, speaking on the company’s earnings call Thursday about the search giant’s efforts in the ad space.
Wojcicki touched on several key areas of Google’s ad strategy, including search, display and mobile.
“As we expand into new kinds of inventory beyond search, our goal is to enable high performance, cross-media campaigns from within AdWords,” she explained.
Mobile, she said, would “be an increasingly important form of advertising as user’s transition to Smart Phones with full browsers.”
Wojcicki said Google wanted to “make it easy for advertisers to extend their existing campaigns to mobile rather than having to start from scratch.”
This, she explained, could even be done at the most basic level by splitting ad teams into groups geared at desktop or mobile to better understand their mobile performance.
“Many of them are surprised by how much mobile activity they have received. Based on this information they can decide how to customize their mobile campaigns going forward,” she noted.
Google, she said, had also rolled out new formats and targeting options specific to the mobile space, including the ‘Click to Call’ feature that automatically puts the phone number in the ad that is running on a Smart Phone.
That means if a user is looking for car insurance and do that query from an Android or iPhone, the ads will include a number to call.
“Not surprisingly this has increased click through, or should I say call through,” she quipped.