advertisingI manage a small hotel and often companies we advertise with online (e.g. Adwords, and online travel agents such as Expedia, Booking.com, TripAdvisor, etc.) give you the ability to set a different cost per click or a lower booking rate for people browsing their sites on mobile devices.
I have never understood how this can actually benefit a business. It doesn’t matter to me if someone completes a sale using a desktop, laptop, cell phone or smoke signals. What matters at the end of the day is the sale. So:
Why is there a trend in online advertising to give lower/preferred rates to people browsing their sites on a mobile device? Do people who browse on their mobile typically close the deal more than people browsing with a desktop?
Is this actually something that businesses could benefit from? Or is it just a marketing ploy created by advertising providers to ultimately make them more money, but really does not affect the company advertising with them very much?
First off a life anecdote. Back when there was no mobile internet, I had a meeting that went on for much longer than planned. I decided to sleep at a hotel instead of driving 3h to get home. But the city was holding a major event and all hotels were… booked.
I was a desperate buyer that evening. I had no internet access for my laptop, and I’d have been fine with just about any place to get some sleep. With a smartphone and your mobile ad I’d have found your hotel in no time. In contrast, I’d have ignored your ad the day before had I seen it on my Desktop while planning my trip. Mobile ads are useful indeed.
A related point is specific to the hospitality business: if you don’t rent your hotel room tonight, you cannot rent it tomorrow. It’s gone forever, because you cannot stock it. As such, you’re better off getting a client at a discount than no client at all so long as it covers your costs plus some.
Savvy travelers, rare as they are, know this. You’ll always find a place that will let you stay with a large discount if you show up at 10pm and ask for one – so why book in advance? It does introduce the problem of knowing where the hotels are, however. And that gets us back to the previous anecdote and the case for mobile ads. I wouldn’t book online (since I cannot negotiate your price down on the site) but I’d call or show up at your door if I run into your ad.
My point in both cases is that mobile ads are more likely to get served in the right context – and that’s their main benefit. The only way for you to know how much better they perform in your case is to try both out and measure which ads convert best.
I’d stress a last benefit in conclusion: there’s less fraud in mobile advertising. On desktop, affiliate fraudsters use adware and low quality traffic to pocket ill-earned commissions on travel sites. They do this by using popovers or invisible browser windows to squeeze themselves between buyers and travel sites as users browse the travel sites. Or by cookie stuffing cheap traffic from porn and torrent sites. And that’s just two of many other types of malpractices. (Disclaimer: the two links go to a client’s site. They’re into fraud detection.) You see a lot less of those dirty tricks on mobile (at least for now), so your traffic quality may be better with mobile ads.
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