4 Ways to Prepare Your Business for Mobile Social Ads

With major social networks embracing mobile ads, how can you tell if your business is ready to reach on-the-go prospects? Here are a four ways to prepare your business for mobile ads on social apps:

1. Mobile Traffic Analytics Review

Chances are, you’re already receiving traffic to your site from mobile devices. Some of this traffic may be referred to your site from social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. Take an in-depth look at this traffic for patterns:

• What devices convert more often?
• Which social networks deliver more leads?
• Are there any leaks in the mobile sales funnel?

2. Mobile Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

In any marketing effort, it’s always important to start with the end in mind. Figure out exactly what you hope to achieve, and work with your team to find out the best ways of measuring success. If you’re trying to bring in new sales leads, for instance, than a good KPI might include submitting a contact form. Keep in mind that mobile behavior is different than desktop behavior, so whatever KPIs you developed for your desktop campaigns may not completely translate to mobile.

3. Mobile Marketing Tracking Mechanism

Once you establish your KPIs, you’ll need to make sure you have appropriate tracking mechanisms in place. These can include Google Analytics Goals and Event Tracking, in which case you’ll probably need to use something like the Google URL Builder to properly tag your mobile social ad URLs. This will allow you to properly attribute KPI activities to specific ads and devices.

4. Mobile Optimized Site

Perhaps the most critical piece of the puzzle is ensuring that your site is mobile optimized. Here are a few ways of accomplishing this:

1. A cross-platform friendly site that functions well on desktop and handheld. This means designing and building a site that works just as well on a desktop device as it does on a handheld device. With CSS3 and HTML5, sites can even rearrange their content based on the window size. Here’s a good example of a fluid site. Try resizing your window to see how it works.
2. Mobile style sheets to make your site appear differently on desktop and handheld devices. This involves applying different styles (e.g., colors, sizes, backgrounds) to elements (e.g., images, text, tables) depending on whether the device is handheld (i.e., mobile phone or tablet) or desktop. Depending on the mobile device, however, it may default to the desktop styles regardless.
3. A mobile-aware site that can detect what type of device is connecting, allowing the server to deliver completely different content and designs to desktop and handheld devices. Depending on the backend of the site, there may be plug-ins available for this functionality. Mobile Joomla is a free solution for Joomla sites. Visit Mobile Joomla on your desktop and mobile device to see how it works.
4. NOTE: Avoid Flash at all costs. While some Android devices can load Flash sites and elements, many mobile visitors will see big blank gaps wherever Flash is supposed to load. iOS devices, such as iPhones and iPads, make up a large proportion of mobile traffic, and they do not support Flash.

Social media’s prevalence, and the resulting referral traffic, is only growing. It behooves all marketers and site owners to ensure that their sites are easily accessible to mobile visitors. If your site is not mobile optimized, you are sure to see a dramatic drop-off in mobile social ad performance.

If you put these suggestions into practice, your business will be well on its way to adopting its own mobile social ad strategy.

What other ways is your business preparing for mobile? Tell us on Facebook.