Ever since the rollout of the Call-Only Campaign type, mobile traffic has been odd and we are seeing some strange results in a few of our accounts. One client who is a local service provider believes, as we do, that mobile traffic is extremely important. This client’s account is large and well established. That being said, the data from the account is normally predictable but we were concerned about the volume of the mobile traffic. To address this concern, we ran a test that we would like to share.
We started our test with a Search Campaign with no override on mobile traffic as our Control. The mobile traffic volume for this Campaign came in at 20k impressions in the first month. Once this control was in place, we created a Call Only Campaign and put a -100% override on the Control Search Campaign to effectively turn off the mobile traffic and force it into the Call-Only Campaign. After 30 days the Call Only Campaign (mobile) traffic volume came in at 80k impressions, effectively pulling in 4 times more mobile traffic than the Search Campaign.
To our surprise when we returned the mobile device override back to “no override” in our Control, we experienced even more impressions! Collectively this configuration (having the Search and Call Only Campaigns both running) got 100k impressions, not the 80k we expected. Because we were surprised by this we ran the test again in another region and that yielded the same results.
While the logic behind this is still unclear to us, what is clear is that running both campaign types gets us a higher impression share in a very competitive market. Mobile traffic continues to follow the approximate 80/20 share split between the Call Only and Search Campaigns with the Call Only bringing in 80% of the mobile traffic and Search bringing in 20%. This test was conducted with a CPA bid Search Campaign. We are currently looking at a CPC test; So far the results seem to be the same however the data is still incomplete.
If mobile traffic is important to you, we recommend that you test your account to see if you get the same results.