Fact: The Promise of Mobile Advertising Has Finally Arrived

I remember in 2001 when there was a lot of talk about mobile advertising and promise of being able to advertise to consumers in your local area as they were on their mobile devices. That promise of being able to drive revenues through mobile advertising seemed to come up ever year after that and take many forms, but always seemed to fall flat. Geolocation texting, mobile ads and mobile websites took many forms, but often weren't very consumer friendly and didn't really seem to have a large enough audience to be compelling. One problem is that mobile devices at the time were clumsy, slow and not nearly as visually compelling as desktop browser user experience. That started to evolve with the introduction of the iPhone, CSS3 for responsive websites and LTE mobile broadband type data speeds.

To say that mobile advertising has taken off shouldn't be a big surprise for most business owners and managers, although many businesses still don't have mobile-friendly websites yet and are missing out on other mobile advertising opportunities.

Some new facts from Google about mobile:

• There are now trillions of searches on Google.com and over half of those searches happen on mobile devices such as smartphones.
• Nearly one third of all mobile searches on Google are searches the contain a location related keyword in it.
• 1 in 3 of searches done on a mobile phone are made right before the consumer makes a purchase and consumer is more likely to buy than on a desktop computer.
• Most mobile searches are for business hours, directions to a local store, product availability or the local store address
• Location-related mobile searches are growing 50% faster than mobile searches in general.
• More than half of all web traffic for the millions of website owners using Google Analytics now comes from smartphones and tablets.

Did you know that if your website is not mobile-friendly in Google's eyes then you probably won't show up on page #1 of search results on Google for searches done on mobile devices? When I say "mobile-friendly" what I don't mean is that your website displays on a mobile device, but that it displays in a very friendly format, that is different than the desktop display. This is often done as a responsive website or some other type of mobile format.

So, the promise of mobile has finally arrived. Took about 14 years since the promise was made and mobile continues to evolve, but if your business isn't in mobile advertising now, then you are probably missing out on about 50% of your potential audience that your competitors are getting. Something to think about.