Hangout recap - Making search ads work for businesses with mobile apps

Want to learn how to use new AdWords search ads to promote and track your mobile app, and hear from early adopters who have done so?

Last Thursday, we hosted Google Product Manager Anurag Agrawal in conversation with Brian Wright, Senior Marketing Manager at Lookout Mobile Security and Troy Morris, Mobile Marketing Manager at WhitePages.com in a Google+ Hangout. They discussed the value of using search ads to promote their respective mobile apps. Anurag then showed us in a live demo how to set up features that can help app developers promote and track downloads of their mobile app.

To see the full conversation, watch the Hangout here:

Below, Brian Wright (BW) and Troy Morris (TM) discuss role of search advertising in growing their mobile app business.

Google: Why has your business chosen to promote your mobile apps?
Brian Wright: We provide a mobile app that helps smartphone users protect their phones against data loss, theft and malware. The more users we have, the more data we have about the threats out there in the mobile ecosystem - so in order to make our technology effective, it’s important for us to acquire users.

Google: Why use AdWords search ads to promote your mobile app?
BW: We promote our apps on the major mobile ad networks and via carrier partnerships. However, search encourages a different type of user behavior that’s different from iTunes or Google Play Store browsing. Our search users are looking for more information, but they might not know an app is a solution to what they’re looking for. It’s great to get in front of those people with search ads.

WhitePages.com and Lookout Mobile Security promote their apps using AdWords mobile search ads

Google: What’s the value of running search ads to promote your mobile app?
Troy Morris: There is an intent users have on search, in our case - to find someone. Conversion rates easily eclipse that of other ad networks so we’re able to get downloads at responsible costs, which helps the overall lifetime value of these users.

What’s also great is that even before Android download tracking was launched, Google was ahead of the curve to give us insights we couldn’t get through other channels. We could track performance from the campaign, down to the ad group and keyword level. It gives us a massive amount of control we don’t see on other ad networks. It gives me the ability to go in at any point in the day to adjust bids or ads, and optimize to where every single penny counts.

To learn more about how to set up these new features in your AdWords account, check out the recording of the Hangout, or view these instructions in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Sonja Lee, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Mobile Ads