Mobile Advertiser shares experiences in an interview with E-Consultancy

Online Marketing and e-commerce research and consulting firm E-Consultancy recently conducted an interview with Chris Smith, online marketing manager at Autoglass, who shares his experiences on mobile advertising and their new .mobi site. Autoglass is one of the UK’s largest vehicle glass replacement companies.

Being the online marketing manager, Chris wanted to see how mobile advertising would perform for his company. Last year, Autoglass launched a stripped down mobile version on their main website at a cost of around GBP 2,000 ( approximately USD 4,000) and currently trying to monitor the traffic flow and the testing the options that both search and display advertising provide.

In the interview, Chris shares his experiences with mobile advertising and his company’s future plans with their .mobi site.

As Smith shared with E-Consultancy, Autoglass is still experimenting with mobile advertising and wants to be prepared for the time when mobile advertising really becomes popular and part of a user’s everyday life.

"Our main site is not currently optimised for mobile phones, so this is a bit of a test. Ultimately, I would like to do clever stuff on the main site with device detection, but for the moment, we are running it as a separate .mobi site."

Chris also said that although the new site was launched late last year, they started promoting it only in April 2008 due to initial problems faced with tracking the traffic. He also said that Google Analytics is still probably not geared very well for tracking mobile websites, and why they are using the analytics tools from Bango for past few months.

"We were using Google Analytics, but obviously that is not really geared up for mobile as it uses JavaScript, which most mobiles are not geared up to handle. It would tell us we had 100% direct visitors and so on, but it wouldn’t give me any breakdown on where those visitors were coming from. It was obvious it wasn’t really a workable solution for mobile."

Autoglass is trying to drive traffic to their mobile site using both natural and paid mobile search. They already use paid search with Yahoo! and banner advertisements to bring traffic. Chris also shared that Autoglass will soon start using paid search on Google as well.

Chris said that search is good for conversion than banners for products that users do not usually shop around for, in their case, windscreens. However, he also mentioned that although search has better return on investment (ROI) than display, the latter provides a lot of visibility, which is also very important in mobile advertising, given the various screen sizes that different mobile phones have. Talking on how display performs, he said "It puts us in front of a lot of people and a lot of people are clicking through, but I think a lot of that is because of curiosity rather than anything else. I think a lot of people are probably clicking on the ads because they are prominent."

"I am also very interested to see if the traffic patterns are the same on the mobile web as they are on the web. Search is very, very important to us - we are a distress purchase; you don’t go shopping for a new windscreen because you fancy a new one. You have a definite need for it", said Chris.

Autoglass did not use a dedicated mobile agency to develop their mobile website and have learnt how various devices can pose problems for the mobile advertiser. Chris said, "As far as building the site is concerned, getting it to look halfway decent on different phone browsers is a challenge. Looking at the site on a Nokia is very different to looking at it on a Blackberry. That has been a bit of a headache for us. I’ve looked at other companies sites’ and I can see we are not alone in that."

However, Chris is very positive about mobile advertising and .mobi sites. He also agrees that there is plenty of work that needs to be done in the space and more people will visit mobile sites in the near future compared to those who currently do.

To read the full interview with Chris Smith, please visit E-Consultancy

Source: E-Consultancy

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