Tracking clicks from smart phones

30th July 2010 by Mackenzie Cockram

Google are have responded to the growing market of mobile browsers with the introduction of the Mobile ValueTrack parameter.

With the rapid expansion of smart phones users spending an increasing large portion of their time online it seems only natural that businesses need to create campaigns with the mobile market in mind and the latest additions from Google help PPC professionals do that.

Over the years we have been able to track clicks coming through the search and Google Display Network and now we can use the same principles to do so for mobile search as Google Adwords bloggers explain:

To use this feature, you just need to add the Mobile ValueTrack parameter: {ifmobile:NewTagName} to the “Destination URL” field when you create a text ad.

There are two ways to take advantage of this feature:

Automatic re-directs to mobile optimized sites
By adding the MobileTrack parameter to your landing page URL, you can automatically redirect people using mobile devices to a mobile-optimized version of your site. In the example below, you can create a mobile site at www.travelingdog.net/mobile and ensure that mobile clicks get re-directed to this site by adding the Mobile ValueTrack parameter, {ifmobile:mobile}. Note that non-Google-ads traffic to your site won’t have the ValueTrack parameter, so it’s still a good idea to send all users to your mobile-optimized site.

Third party tracking tags
Additionally, If you use third party tracking to identify how many of your visitors clicked through to your site from your AdWords ads, you can use Mobile ValueTrack to track clicks coming from mobile devices. Just insert a tag into your destination URL. Let’s say that you’re Travel Dog Company and want to distinguish clicks coming from mobile devices. By adding the Mobile ValueTrack parameter to your landing page URL, www.travelingdog.net?type={ifmobile:hello}, the tag “hello” will be inserted into the destination URL allowing you to see which clicks are coming from mobile devices.

Mobile ValueTrack works for both WAP mobile ads and regular text and image ads on iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers. So search professionals are no longer left guessing where their clicks are coming from.

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  4. Mobile Internet Use and SEO
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  8. Mobile SEO – the flipside

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