This case study consisted of attempting to do lead generation off of mobile devices. What I did was set up a campaign on Admob.com in a highly competitive market to test the response. I used Admob’s built-in lead generation form to design my landing page, so I didn’t have to create my own mobile compliant landing page.
I set up a budget of $250, which only took me 12 hours to deplete and here were the results:
Impressions served: 1,328,737
Clicks: 3,456
CTR: 0.26%
Avg. CPC: $0.07
Valid Leads Generated: 280
I initially started my bids at $0.10, but the traffic was coming fast and furious, so I dropped it to $0.05.
Like I mentioned, this was an extremely competitive market and it cost me an average $0.89 per lead. Now you may think that this is expensive, but I was asking for FULL address information. So I asked for name, address, city, state and zip code. I now have a list of 280 valid addresses for this market.
Note: You will NEVER get $0.05 on Google, Yahoo or MSN for this market… trust me!
There are many possibilities that i can do with this list, such as selling it to an offline broker or monetizing it myself.
I have some plans for my new find list and will keep you updated on the progress, but so far I am in the hole $250.
Or you could say, I have invested $250 into this mobile marketing campaign.
I will keep you updated. 
Gauher
Hey Gauher,
Awesome results.
I tried driving traffic to a mobile dating offer via the iPhone platform (using the network’s HTML landing), but the discrepancy b/w network impressions and AdMob clicks was quite high, so I assume there is a high abandonment rate.
Man it is frustrating that these CPA networks don’t get with it…
Thanks for providing your insight.
Cheers
Jason
Gauher,
Wow man. You are amazing in coming up with new venues to market. Yes I saw your videos from PPV Formula and I’ve been attempting become successful in that arena…still testing. But anyway you are right about the potential in mobile advertising. I’m thinking selling leads to offline brokers would probably be a good idea if you can make it profitable. That’s what I plan on doing myself. I’m open for suggestions from anyone as well. Let’s jump on this before mainstream marketers do.
email: ollie@olliehales.com
Jason,
Who cares about the CPA networks. Who is to stop us from approaching the advertisers DIRECTLY and bypassing the CPA networks. It would mean more money for all of us in the end per lead anyways.
Gauher
Good point Jason,
maybe we should focus on thinking outside of the box and thinking that the CPA company route is the way to go. I’m sure we could contract with the advertisers directly. I have a friend how owns a couple of major portals….i’ll check with him to see if he has a few ideas. He I know he has experience in this arena.
Ollie
Hi Gauher
I also set up some ads on Admob…you could just see the budget disappearing before your eyes…BOOM!
There is a high number of abandonments..but I suppose it depends on the offer..
Graham
You got me interest here. Showing promise. I’m following.
Gauher:
Cool stuff here. I look forward to monitoring your progress on this. I’m hoping you hit the jackpot soon so you can work on putting a course together for us;)
Until then, I’ll watch and learn as much as I can by following these case studies.
I did some research on what people are searching for on mobile devices. The main searches were (and not in order of priority) travel, news, entertainment, sports, movies, and weather.
There is a company that is contracting with movie theaters so that movie goers can buy tickets through their mobile devices and then have the UPC of the ticket sent to them. When they arrive in the theater, they just open up their device and the theater scans the UPC code. Brilliant idea!!
Travis
Hi Gauher,
I was too curious, so I dug around a bit more into the mobile world … here are a few links that might interest you.
Head over to Bango ( http://bango.com ) for mobile analytics and billing services. And flip through a presentation by Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango at http://mobilemonday.org.uk/ray.pdf
If you’re looking for a way to build your mobile website, then check out mobiSiteGalore ( http://www.mobisitegalore.com ). Be sure to watch the “View Demo Movie” … it’s sweet.
Mike Davidson put together an article entitled “Make Your Site Mobile – Friendly in Two Minutes” at ( http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/07/make-your-site-mobile-friendly ). You’ll find a pile more resources if you scroll to the bottom of that article.
Here’s the site for “Mobile Internet World 2008″ ( http://www.mobilenetx.com ) … it starts today, so if anyone lives nearby, let us know how you made out.
Best from Athens,
Bob
This is exciting stuff…can’t wait to set up a few of my own mobile marketing test campaigns!
I think it will be better for all of us if you prepare a video tutorial showing how you desing you landing page. Better yet, you should prepare a video tutorial showing step by step how to do exactly what you did…
I can’t help but think of the possibilities with this advertising medium. Thanks for providing this information, I know since watching your videos I am hooked on this. Also Bob thanks for the other great links, I like mobisitegalore, going to give it a try for my next advertising campaign.
Gauher
Nice work, dude.
Q: Did you send people to a URL that you put on the mobile landing page or have them opt-in actually on the mobile landing page?
Q: Did you target a particular device type (e.g. iPhone, Blackberry) or manufacturer?
Thanks
KFK
I think Gauher used AdMob’s internal landing pages.
And you can place an opt-in box right on a landing page.
AdMob will gather and save leads for you.
Mobile advertising would continue to grow as more and more mobile phone users get hooked on texting and mobile browsing.-,*
I am promoting a few pay per call offers on AdMob but I am not being successful at all. My budget evaporated in a few hours and I got no leads. I had lots of clicks and a few phone calls but none of them went over 25 seconds on the phone, when I needed them to stay longer than one minute so I could get paid. I know people always talk about statistics on how many people in the planet use mobile phones but it seems harder than i thought to get people to click on the ads and call the numbers. I think I need some help… I know mobile marketing requires a lot of testing but man, seriously, if you don’t find soon an ad that works, you just spend spend spend money and don’t see a single penny coming in. Do you have any suggestion on campaigns that REALLY work and how to target them? Thanks!