According to the Macquarie Group, a banking and investment firm, Google has brought its dominance of desktop search to the mobile arena, garnering 97 percent of global mobile search advertising spending. These services account for five percent of paid search in the U.S. — a figure that is expected to double in 2011.
Yahoo and Bing make up the remaining three percent of paid mobile advertising.
Google has seen its mobile search queries increase by more than 500 percent during the past two years
Although restaurants, automotive, consumer electronics, finance and insurance, and beauty and personal searches comprise the top five mobile search categories (accounting for more than 92 percent of mobile search volume), opportunities for adult marketers do exist — especially when one considers the fast growing volume of mobile search queries.
For example, Google has seen its mobile search queries increase by more than 500 percent during the past two years, bringing the company more than $1 billion annually from its mobile search and display advertising efforts.
“Clearly, this is the future of search in the Internet,” Google SVP Jonathan Rosenberg said during a previous earnings call. “Our mobile search queries have grown five times over the past couple of years, and of course, a lot more of those queries are now coming from Android phones.”
To compare these figures with traditional PC metrics, mobile campaigns reportedly average 30 percent lower click-through rates than ads on the desktop, while cost-per-click rates for mobile search run 13 percent higher than ad spots on their PC counterparts — making mobile a higher cost, lower performance, but still potentially profitable, option.
Bolstering its initiatives, Google has updated and re-released its Google Mobile App, now renamed Google Search. The refreshed app for the iPhone incorporates easy text searches with a hook into the phone’s audio recorder for voice-based searches; and into the phone’s camera, for enhanced Google Goggles visual-based searches. Google Search is available as a free download from the App Store.
