My friend Peter Papadimitriou at Globecraft sent me the following email he received from Google:

Dear Peter Papadimitriou,

We are happy to announce a new feature that will allow you to
easily reach additional qualified customers who are searching
Google from their mobile phones.

In the next few days, your search ads will be eligible to run on
Google Mobile Search pages (like they currently do on Google.com).
We are offering this feature – and any resulting clicks – for
free through November 18, so you can experiment with the rapidly
growing mobile platform while still reaching qualified customers.

Each ad’s eligibility will be determined by its landing page and
only ads with landing pages that can be adapted for viewing on
mobile browsers will be shown. You can monitor each ad’s
performance via a special performance tracking page within your
account called “Performance Data: Search Ads on Google Mobile
Search.”

Again, you will not be charged for clicks on these ads until
November 19, at which time we will begin charging the usual CPC
prices. And as always, you may opt-out of this feature at any
time.

We hope you find this new feature helpful and profitable, and we
urge you to learn more about it at our AdWords Help Center:

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=72226

Thank you for advertising with Google AdWords.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

While this news isn’t particularly surprising it should signal the start of optimizing your website for mobile browsing, if you haven’t done so already!

A new study out of Europe shows that young people are far more likely to use new mobile phone services than older consumers.

Over 25% of mobile phone and PDA users access the Internet from their wireless devices. In fact, the study showed 47 per cent of those aged between 15 and 18 use mobile services – compared to just 17 per cent of people aged between 35 and 44.

Nearly a quarter of the young group use at least two new multimedia services – like live TV, music or games – on their mobiles.

However, the report also found that the young are unwilling to pay for additional services on their mobile – suggesting that advertising could be useful.

With The Kelsey Group predicting mobile search to generate more than $1.4 billion in ad revenue by 2012, mobile optimization is moving towards an accelerated pace.

What do you think, should there be a rush to recommend mobile optimization for clients or should we take a wait and see approach?

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3 gripping comments

No-one should rush to recommend optimization for any specific device ever. You can't make one site for one browser, one for another, one for browsing with a remote control using Windows Media Center, one for mobile devices, etc.

You can however (easily!) make sites which will work well on *most* devices.

If you were to open a brick-and-mortar, would you go with a door that can be used by some or most people? Recommending to optimize the door for only one group of people and making new doors for others simply isn't good business practice.

Of course, if a certain segment of the population would both use the door a lot *and* spend a lot of money — why not entice them to make use of your shop more often by putting a special door for them in place?

Ruud Hein  ^#

[...] off the heels of Google offering free mobile Adwords until mid November and The Kelsey Group boldly predicting mobile search to generate more than $1.4 [...]

Mobile Marketing? Schmobile Marketing!  ^#

Mobile web sites were meant to take off years ago here in the UK.

Nothing…

As to trying it, I'm really undecided. Certainly everyone except the very old (70+) appears to have at least one mobile in the UK.

How many surf for mobile sites though?

jim  ^#