Understanding when your consumers are buying is one of the most important aspects for your campaign. However, with mobile searches being more popular than ever, the consumer journey has become more complex. Shoppers are now looking at their mobile devices throughout the day. These searches have become “micro-moments.” The ability to capture these micro-moments is what will set agencies apart.
What are “Micro-Moments?”
Search on mobile is huge and will only get bigger. This is clearly evidenced by Google’s drastic changes in their AdWords to help marketers take advantage of search on mobile (think Expanded Text Ads).
Search on mobile however is much different than a search on a consumer’s desktops. This is because they are shorter and intent-driven. Micro-moments are the many different moments that make up a consumer’s day where a user searches for something on the top of his/her mind. They are typically: “I-want-to-go,” “I-want-to-know,” “I-want-to-do,” “I-want-to-buy” moments. This may occur when they are waiting online at a café and check how many calories are in their breakfast or it could be a user scrolling in a doctor’s office trying to figure out what to do after the appointment.
Finding and identifying these small micro-moments are a huge opportunity for marketers to identify and link together the fragmented user journey on mobile.
How to find these Micro-Moments and Dayparting
However, figuring out when these micro-moments are happening is no easy task. One way to attempt to identify when to spend time on mobile is through “dayparting.”
Dayparting involves breaking up the day into parts based on traffic trends. When deciding when to spend money on paid search throughout the day it is important to know your audience. For example, for the majority of working Americans a typical day of search would look like this. First – active use on mobiles before 8 am, next they will typically switch to desktop during the work day (9am-5pm), then back to mobile after the work day and into the night. Therefore you would know not to spend too much on your mobile specific campaigns during the hours of 9am-5pm. However, this is not applicable to all brands. If your target audience is stay-at-home-moms/dads, then you may want to adjust your campaign to reflect the device patterns for your brand.
What can I do?
Mobile ensures that we must be there throughout the day – on all devices. Be sure to set your budget to capture the whole day. This is especially true for mobile since device searches are most popular in the evenings and weekends.
Have a timely message. For example if you own a restaurant you would want to promote breakfast deals in the morning. However, in the afternoon/evening, you would want to promote your happy hour deals.
In short – know your target audience, be more careful with budget dollars, and find out device patterns for your brand to ensure that you are fully taking advantage of these consumer micro-moments.