Editorial Articles

Mobile Commerce handles a quarter of a billion searches per annum and this number is doubling annually. This includes over 25% of the searches coming from the 17.38m Mobile Internet users via UK operator portals, plus a growing number of other portals seeking to monetise their mobile assets.

However, Mobile Search is not PC search and the factors that affect mobile search behaviour are:

1. Ease of text input
2. Ease of navigation
3. Bookmarking

A mobile phone has much smaller text input devices than the keyboard of a PC. This makes input errors much more likely, plus it's less common to bookmark sites so users are much more inclined to use search to get to the content that they visit on a regular basis.

The top 20 most searched terms of 2009 (in order) were:

1. Facebook
2. Google
3. Bebo
4. Youtube
5. www.facebook.com
6. Ebay
7. Ebuddy
8. Facebook.com
9. Hotmail
10. MSN
11. Yahoo
12. Lottery
13. You Tube
14. Face Book
15. Flirtomatic
16. Free Games
17. Yahoo Mail
18. Plenty of Fish
19. Google.com
20. twitter

In total, 29% of all searches by volume were for these twenty terms. The concentration of popular terms is caused by the input, navigation and bookmarking issues raised earlier.
It may seem odd that Google is the second most searched term on mobile but according to Google’s 2009 Zeitgeist, Google is the 8th most searched term put into the Google search box on a PC!

By collecting together all the terms where the search intent was the same and tagging this into a category a taxonomy can be created. This makes the information easier to see and understand at a macro level. At the category level this is what users looked for in 2009 (Please see fig1).

Do users click on the results? (Yes, they do)

It is possible to analyse which results users actually click on. There is a choice between sponsored listings, mobile optimised internet sites and web sites. The over-whelming number of clicks are for mobile internet results showing that this is the users’ preferred option on mobile over web sites. Mobile Internet sites have been optimised for mobile devices giving a much better user experience (Please see fig2).

What does this mean for the eco-system?

There are some important learnings for both publishers and brands.
Brands can get discovered on mobile in a number of different ways including banner ads, sponsored search results and natural (Mobile Internet and web) results.

Banner ads generally only allow advertisers to bid on clusters of categories – e.g. an advertiser will buy placement for a term that they believe to be appropriate for their product. However, the number of categories is limited which means the relevance is reduced which limits the click rate/effectiveness and hence the cost per click.

Sponsored search is much more effective allowing an advertiser to bid on keywords that are directly relevant to the services it has, and link users directly to that part of their product offering.
Natural results require the correct tagging of sites and must ensure they can be crawled by the search companies. As the mobile screen is small, the number of results visible to a user is much less than on the web. This makes it vital to ensure everything is done for mobile search engine optimisation so the results are featured on the first page of the results set.
For publishers, adding search is a well-proven way to add monetisation to their site. The search boxes on operator portals are driving revenues and publishers can do the same.

Steve Page
CEO, Mobile Commerce Ltd
Twitter: sjspage