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Optimize Paid-Search Campaigns From Mobile Apps?

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Lyris has developed an iPhone application that allows marketers to change email campaigns through a mobile dashboard. The company's "mobile email marketing" platform enables features that historically have been exclusive to the desktop.  

It seems that advertising and marketing were among the last industries to pick up on mobile apps to improve business functions. Email marketing software until now offered basic functions from mobile devices. Marketers could do little from their mobile device, despite smartphones gaining in importance.

Supply chain software makers, from enterprise resource planning (ERP) to customer relationship management (CRM), have long supplied mobile apps to improve business functions for more than a decade. They needed the mobile apps to support managers walking through warehouses and storage facilities.

Most mobile apps for the ad industry have been geared toward consumers. But there are many search marketing platforms that could benefit from mobile applications. Take Kenshoo, for example. The company launches Wednesday a platform called Landing Page Watchdog, where real-time monitoring of landing pages for search ads and alerts provide what the company calls "brand protection and campaign effectiveness."

An algorithm checks the validity of paid-search destination URLs 24 hours per day, while prioritizing landing pages for ads critical to the campaign's success. Beyond "page not found" errors, the Watchdog alerts campaign managers to pages that have too many redirects, thus slowing down the user experience and potentially harming search engine quality scores.

Why not create iPhone and Android apps for that? While Kenshoo has no immediate plans to release a dedicated mobile app for Watchdog, Aaron Goldman, the company's CMO, can see the value it would provide. "Many technology platforms like ours have lots of great functions that could be stripped down and made available to customers 'on the go,'" he says. "While I don't see a day when you could ever use Kenshoo Search soup to nuts via mobile app, I can see pulling out certain features like Watchdog into apps to get alerts and make quick campaign optimizations at any time from any device."

Kenshoo's customers are enterprise advertisers and agencies with millions of dollars at stake to supporting millions of keywords. Not the kind of transactions they would want to do via mobile apps, Goldman says. Complex business transactions require a full suite, he says.

Some search marketers wouldn't want to optimize paid-search ad campaigns on a mobile phone. Would you?

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