The world is changing fast – and so do our expectations. The intimate relationship people hold to their smartphone and other connected devices results in promising advantages when it comes to interacting with your customers, but keeping up is key. The third Module of Google’s Mobile Academy focused on offering tangible solutions in how to put mobile first and get prepared for tomorrow’s reality.
Start fast - stay engaged
Mobile makes for many moments throughout the day in which you can have people connect to your brand and tune right into their needs. Your customers want to be helped right when they need it. Speed is of absolute necessity; Google’s Bas Jansen emphasizes, especially during the phase of acquisition. If it’s not instant, it’s not fast enough. Mobile websites take on average 8,6 seconds to load. The majority of the users, however, will not wait: after 3 seconds they’ve left. This pre bounce rate is hard to measure, but causes for the loss of many moments of opportunity.
Luckily this can be overcome by making use of the latest web technologies such as PWA; progressive web apps that present the interaction and engagement of a native app experience, whilst they take as little as less a second to load. They are useful to users from the very first visit in a browser, no install required. Nowadays it’s even possible to give out-of-browser permission for push notifications and set up integrated credentials for seamless sign in and safe, one tap checkout.
Then there is AMP; accelerated mobile pages that are consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms. The effect shows: leading French organic retailer Greenweez gained an 80 percent increase in mobile conversion rates through AMP, thanks to a five-fold increase of mobile page speed.
Modern mobile web also solves for people’s reluctance to download a new app. It seems that the average Dutch smartphone owner uses no more than 24 different apps and half of the people tend not to install any new apps for at least three months. So if your company’s native app is not among those, you’ll have a hard time building reach this way.
The possibilities of web do not only meet user expectations, they easily exceed them. By 2020 30 percent of all searches will happen without a screen. Already your are able to buy towels by telling Google Home, because it knows what towels you bought before and where, and how to pay. Already travelling agent Expedia permits their customers to order a rental car by voice after they’ve booked a trip. Think about how your company can be of use to your customers without a screen involved.
Future of search
Internet search is about giving the most relevant results for that person in that particular moment. “The perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you need,” Google’s co-founder Larry Page conveyed early on. In the 18 years since then, we’ve seen the world get transformed by mobile. Half of the 2 trillion searches per year already occur on mobile – and the revolution is just beginning.
“In the next 10 years, we’ll shift to a world that is AI-first,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai predicts. We see computing becoming embedded into everything that people regularly interact with, Google’s Karen Carbonez exemplifies. More and more devices will have smart features and be connected to the internet, and remember our preferences. Intel estimates that in only 3 years time there will roughly be 200 billion connected objects in the world: about 26 smart devices per person - all made smarter with progress in machine learning. Assistive technology is rapidly becoming integrated into our daily lives and shapes the way people and organizations interact with each other.
Next to that, the switch to AI impacts your marketing activities. It’s important to make for a natural and intuitive experience: people shouldn’t need to adapt or learn to ‘speak computer’. Instead, thanks to improvements in language understanding and processing, computers actually learn how to adapt to humans.
Artificial intelligence finds itself still in its early stages, but being in the frontline can undeniably benefit your company. A low-threshold way of incorporating AI into your customer journey is jumping into the possibilities that image and voice search provides. These change the way customers search, and demand a more complex approach. Voice search, for instance, transforms customer journeys into conversations, resulting in more long tail keywords. A great plus are the extra signals you receive. The way a question is asked, for instance, reveals a lot about the degree of intent of the customer.
Furthermore, you can use the power of machine learning to improve your advertising and have AI automate your bidding to the best results possible. Computer performance combined with human insights indisputably lead to smarter marketing campaigns. That way you do not only set up for a better return on investment, you also free up time to think about the next big thing.
Mobile measurement
Cross device tracking is indispensable when it comes to attributing value to your channels, Thijs Wolbers of Google partner Adwise discloses. It allows you to map the full customer journey and overcome the ROPO effect, when research is done online whereas actual purchases happen offline. These measurements reveal the power of your campaigns and support a dynamic form of marketing in which agile strategic decisions allows you to easily side-line your competitors. When it comes to measurement there is one thing you don’t wish to do and that’s sticking to traditional last-click transactions and revenue metrics. We often value mobile traffic through the actual conversion rate, Marcel Smal of Google partner iProspect explains, but that’s really just the tip of the iceberg.
First, decide what the actual KPIs are that drive value to your organization, from hard conversions to soft conversions such as calls, store visits and email subscriptions. Another thing to take into account is the added customer lifetime value, which prompts loyalty and possible word-of-mouth marketing. How much each of these variables are worth is up to each organization itself to decide. It’s okay to use proxy indicators and estimates when starting out. This is a constant process of revaluation and not valuing them at all will in every case be ‘more wrong’.
Then comes the process of measuring, reporting your findings and steering on that. The outcome is a newly found data driven strategy. Campaigns flowing out of this, you will then be able to analyze for validation – after which you probably readjust your KPI’s and their worth. A nice way to see whether customers visit a physical store because of advertisement, or regardless of it, is to experiment with unrelated keywords and analyze conversion paths.
Don’t be surprised if insights appear staggering: often we focus too much on the last interactions before the purchase, whilst there is much to be gained in the beginning of the customer journey. Advertising at this point is cheaper as well and there’s a big chance your competitors hadn’t thought of this point either, unlike your own organization after a series of thorough analyses. It’s all about measuring, readjusting and thereby improving your data driven strategy.
How to organize for mobile growth
When making radical data driven decisions, you have to be sure to trust your data, Joost Fromberg from Google partner Online Dialogue tells.
Organizing people in the journey towards evidence-based growth consists of three phases. The first phase is transactional, so to say, and based around conversion rate optimization. This requires manpower in the field of analytics, UX and front-end development.
Phase two is more of an informational kind: your organization will then also require a behavioral expert or psychologist who can tap into the habits of your customers. Someone who not only sees raw statistics but also the possible underlying psychological implications. Any knowledge in the shape of customer intelligence gives great advantage when it comes to defining where to find your sweet spot in the customer journey.
The third phase, however, is what you wish to aim for. This is the transformational segment in which you gather all data and turn that into new business models. It’s about ‘second order learning’: the rethinking of dominant models. This is when successful disruption and innovation occurs.
