A report from Marin Software found that businesses using paid search campaigns are seeing one-quarter of their clicks come from mobile devices, as more Americans turn to smartphones to search the web.
According to the company, this figure represents 103 percent growth from earlier reports analyzing activity from 2011, as a little less than one-eighth of all search clicks came from mobile in the past. While the reasons for this increase are numerous, the growth of smartphone use, paired with greater reliance on search engines, stand out as the most important factors.
While smartphone use is driving substantial mobile PPC activity, tablets have had a similar effect on the channel. Marin found that the average click-through rate for a PPC ad on a tablet is 3.14 percent, which is greater than the 2.39 percent seen on desktop computers. Smartphones were No. 1 with a CTR of 4.12 percent.
Using PPC can help companies give their website a quick jolt of traffic by ranking well on high-volume keywords.
Brafton recently reported that SEO content marketing can be key to driving PPC traffic. Creating content pages optimized for organic search and using these as landing pages for paid search helped one bank lift PPC traffic by more than 300 percent. Plus, while PPC gives boost in the short term, SEO is more likely to help a company drive website traffic and conversions in the long term.
