Restaurant Sees 800% ROI, Boosts Click-Through By 539% With Mobile Click-To-Call

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Click-to-call has been a central element to Google's mobile display offerings, and for good reason. The company recently came out with some surprising success statistics indicating hundreds of thousands of advertisers are seeing...millions of calls a month via search and display ads.

Google said over the last three months, the number of Google advertisers using phone extensions on mobile has grown by an average of 28 percent month-over-month globally. The company said campaigns with the click-to-call feature report 6-8 percent higher click-through rates than ads that don’t have it. One advertiser in particular has seen even higher success.

Roy’s, a chain of Hawaiian restaurants, recently reported it has seen an 800 percent in return on investment after pursuing a mobile-only hyper-local campaign that relied on click-to-call as a major element. The mobile-only campaign helped increase calls to restaurants by 40 percent and click-through rates by 539 percent compared to desktop. The cost per click was also 67% less than desktop ads.

“With...hyperlocal mobile advertising, we were able to target our potential guests at their point of need. Mobile searchers looking for dining options could effortlessly see how close they were to a nearby Roy’s Restaurant and the click to call function allowed for instant reservations,” said Jason Maloney, Vice President of Marketing for Roy’s. ”The numbers are impossible to ignore. We have to invest in hyperlocal mobile advertising as part of our long-term growth strategy.”

iPhone Still Handily Beating Android

It might feel like 2010 was the year of Android as Google boasts 300,000 Android devices activated daily, Nielsen found that Android devices were most popular with first-time smartphone buyers and the monthly OS ad impression share tied the previously dominant iOS on Millennial Media’s mobile ad network.

But it seems the U.S. is still the iPhone’s market to lose according to analysis by Asymco’s Horace Dediu, as iPhones at AT&T outsold Android units at chief competitor by a factor of 2.5 during the first and second quarter of 2010.

It’s pretty reasonable to compare the sales of the two American wireless giants: Verizon has 92.1 million subscribers while AT&T has 90.1 million. Together, Verizon and AT&T account for 75% of mobile data revenue and 62% of U.S. wireless users.

The Verizon sales data comes from ITG Investment Research, which employs Verizon smartphone sales data collected from thousands of independent wireless retailers. Verizon smartphone volume during the first two quarters (which includes BlackBerry and Palm devices) grew from 2.7 million to 3.3 million, but iPhone sales volume increased from 2.7 million to 5.3 million.

So it looks like the release of the iPhone 4 (Antennagate and all) really shot sales into stratosphere. Deidu argues that Android simply can’t compete, and suggests an internal realization of that encouraged Verizon to pursue the iPhone again.

Once the iPhone 4 arrives at Verizon (rumored to happen early next year) it’s bound to eat even further into U.S. Android sales. While this certainly doesn’t mean that Android is dead in the water, it appears the Google OS will not steal the smartphone crown from iPhone anytime soon. How much for an iAd again?

-Gavin Dunaway

Mobile App Revenues Projected to Hit $35 Billion by 2014

Noting the runaway growth of the mobile applications business (more than 300,000 mobile apps developed in just over three years), research firm IDC now estimates that global app revenues will top $35 billion by the end of 2014.

IDC also projects that over the next four years worldwide download totals will grow from 10.9 billion (in 2010) to 76.9 billion in 2014.

Observing that the expansion of the mobile applications market will continue to reach new devices like connected TVs, IDC maintains that the so-called “appification” of our world (defined as “broad categories of interactions and functions in both the physical and the digital worlds”) will continue to expand at warp speed.

According to IDC vice president of mobile and wireless research, Scott Ellison, “Mobile app developers will ‘appify’ just about every interaction you can think of in your physical and digital worlds.”

“The extension of mobile apps to every aspect of our personal and business lives will be one of the hallmarks of the new decade with enormous opportunities for virtually every business sector,” he added.

And whom will benefit most from the prevalence of mobile apps? Users, of course – most of whom now enjoy via the smartphone a broad array of apps that range in utility from a “good way to kill time” to a fantastic tool or mechanism that makes life easier or some task more expedient.

“Mobile applications have the power to change the way we live,” Ellison concludes.

And that’s exactly what they continue to do.

Mobile Advertising Trends For 2011

Mobile advertising and optimization company Smaato today released an interesting slideshare presentation that outlines proposed mobile advertising trends for 2011 in the world’s three strongest regions — The US, Europe and Asia.

Compiled using market analysis by leading market research companies, Smaato’s presentation gives a matter of fact representation of where the mobile advertising market is likely to go in 2011 and beyond. “In 2011 we will be inside the tornado of the mobile industry,” said Harald Neidhardt, CMO & Co-Founder, Smaato Inc. ”Mobile apps will continue to surprise the media; new smartphones and tablet PCs are enhancing our daily digital lives; and with new innovations like LTE broadband bandwidth, NFC smartphones and more relevant mobile ad formats, we will see a dramatic lift off in global Mobile Advertising,” stated Harald Neidhardt, CMO & Co-Founder, Smaato Inc.

While we’re closing out 2010 as a breakout year in mobile advertising, Smaato pulled out these key findings to summarize where we’re at and where we’re likely to go over the coming year:

Asia is still the leader in mobile advertising and will proceed being the strongest market in terms of ad spending. In 2010 Japanese companies already invested more than $1 billion in this business followed by South Korea and China ($270M and $180M). In Asia more than 15 billion page impressions are being generated on a daily basis in mobile.

The US is the second largest market globally in terms of mobile advertising spending behind Japan. It will close the gap next year with a forecast of $1.24 billion and will grow up to $5 billion in 2015.

The top 5 European countries (UK, Italy, France, Germany, Spain) will see a huge increase in mobile ad spending according to Smaato. End of 2010 these “Big Five” are estimated to have 65 million mobile internet users; this number will more than double within the next 5 years up to 160 million. The “Big Five” will reach the $1 billion mark approximately in 2014.

48 Percent Of Mobile App Users Report Using The Mobile Web More Often

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Here are some results from a study by St. Louis-based ad agency Moosylvania shows the top 10 mobile apps broken down by gender in the US, as well as indicating a preference for the mobile Web from those surveyed.

The study polled 7,000 respondents, split equally among men and women, with 99% of which being 18 years of age or older. Of those 7,000 respondents, 61% use a smartphone and 80% of the smartphone users use apps consistently. The study found that 30 apps were the norm per smartphone.

“Apps can be an incredible brand experience and provide an extraordinary level of connectivity with consumers,” said Norty Cohen, president and founder of Moosylvania.

...The most interesting part of the study was the finding that almost half (48%) of the respondents said they used the mobile Web more than apps on their smartphones.