Ads That Send Phone Searchers to a Desktop Page

A page only ever seen on a computer

Most landing pages are built, reviewed and approved on a computer. Then the campaign goes live, and a large share of the clicks come from phones.

Nobody in the business sees what those people see, because nobody in the business clicks their own ads on a phone.

The campaign report shows clicks, cost and a disappointing number of enquiries, and the usual conclusion is that phone traffic is poor.

Often the traffic is fine. The page is what fails it.

What a phone visitor meets

• Tiny text that needs pinching before anything can be read.
• Buttons and links sized for a mouse pointer, not a thumb.
• A long form with drop-down lists that phones handle badly.
• Heavy images or a slider that loads before the words do.
• A pop-up whose close button sits off the screen.
• A Flash element that shows as an empty box.

The third is the one that loses the most enquiries. Someone happy to tap a call button may still abandon a form that asks for fourteen things on a screen showing two fields at a time.

Why the campaign report hides it

AdWords reports each campaign as a whole, with computers, tablets and phones mixed together, so a page that fails on phones shows up only as a weaker average.

Segment the campaign by device and the picture splits. Clicks, cost and conversions appear separately for each, and a page that works on one and fails on another shows plainly.

Check that calls are counted too. Phone visitors often ring instead of filling in a form, and if only forms count, phones look worse than they are.

A phone and ten minutes

Open each landing page on your own phone, with the Wi-Fi switched off, and try to do what the ad asked.

Read the first screen without zooming. Tap the phone number and see whether it dials. Fill in the form with a thumb, and send it.

Then run the page through Google's Mobile-Friendly Test. It flags the usual faults by name: unreadably small text, links crowded together, content wider than the screen.

A narrowed browser window on a computer is not the same test. It shows the layout, not the slow connection, the thumb or the keyboard covering half the form.

Every ad group has its own page

A campaign rarely sends everyone to one page. Each ad group may point somewhere different, and sitelinks add more destinations.

List every final URL the account uses and check each on a phone, starting with the pages that receive the most clicks.

If a page cannot be fixed quickly, an ad can send phone clicks to a different address, its mobile final URL, so phones reach a page that works.

A worked example

An airport shuttle company runs vans between the airport and several towns a couple of hours inland, with seats booked in advance.

Its AdWords campaign targeted searches for shuttles to those towns, and every ad led to the booking page. That page had been built on a computer: a wide timetable, a date picker that needed a mouse and a fourteen-field form.

Segmenting by device showed what the totals hid. Phones brought a large share of the clicks and almost none of the bookings.

The mechanism was the moment of the search. Phone clicks clustered around flight arrivals, from people standing at the baggage carousel: the most ready to book, meeting the page least able to take a booking.

While the page was rebuilt, the mobile bid adjustment was lowered and a call extension added, so phone searchers could ring the dispatcher instead.

The new page put the next departures and fares at the top and the phone number in a button, and cut the form to name, phone, flight, date and seats.

What a phone landing page needs

The answer to the ad's promise on the first screen: the price, the times, the area served, whatever the ad mentioned.

A phone number that dials when tapped, and buttons large enough for a thumb, with space around them.

A form with only the fields needed to reply, each set up to open the right keyboard, so a phone number field brings up the number pad.

Images sized for phones, and nothing that covers the page before the visitor has read it.

Until the page is fixed

Paying for phone clicks that land on a broken page is the most expensive way to find out it is broken.

The mobile bid adjustment can lower what you pay for phone clicks, or take phones out of a campaign entirely at minus one hundred percent, while the page is rebuilt.

Call extensions and call-only ads let phone searchers ring without visiting the page at all, which suits businesses that book by phone anyway.

Treat these as a bridge, not a fix. Phone visitors also arrive from search results, listings and links, and the page has to work for them too.

The page affects the price of the click

AdWords rates the landing page as part of each keyword's Quality Score, and that score affects how much you pay and where the ad appears.

A page that frustrates visitors is the kind it rates down. Fixing the phone experience matters for the people who reach it, and it can change what each click costs.

The counter-case

Some businesses get few phone clicks worth having. A supplier selling to purchasing departments, or a service that needs drawings to quote, may be right to bid down on phones.

Some visitors also research on a phone and book later on a computer, and the device figures will show that pattern if it exists.

Even then the page should work on a phone. Lower bids are a choice to make knowingly, not a way of hiding a page nobody has checked.

Before the next phone click

1. Segment each campaign by device.
2. Make sure calls count as conversions.
3. List every final URL in the account.
4. Open each one on a phone, on mobile data.
5. Run the Mobile-Friendly Test on each page.
6. Lower phone bids where a page fails.
7. Rebuild the pages that get the most clicks.

Step four is the one nobody does, and it is the one that shows the problem. Everything else in the account describes the page from a distance; holding a phone is how a customer meets it.

How the ads themselves moved on the page this year is covered in no more ads down the right of Google.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.