• by Steve Baldwin , June 16, 2008

Call me a mobile Luddite, but it's only in the past few weeks that I've acquired an iPod Touch, a device that's basically a phone-less iPhone, whose beauty lies in being able to enjoy most of the functionality of the Web, including browsing, searching, and e-mail. After using this device for a few weeks, I've come to a number of conclusions about searching on mobile devices, not all of them pleasant:

1. Get Used to Errant Clicks on Mobile Devices. The iPod Touch's 3.5-inch multi-touch screen is bountiful by mobile standards, and its built-in Safari browser does an excellent job of replicating the experience we're accustomed to seeing on larger screens. But even the most adept fingers will, in the process of zooming, unzooming, and clicking, occasionally activate the wrong hyperlink, especially on Web pages where many links are embedded in the text stream. I know of no formal studies of this phenomenon, but I'd estimate that at least 10 percent of the clicks I made were to URLs that I never intended to activate, prompting me to immediately hit the back button. This phenomenon - which I'd call MICE (Mobile Induced Click Error) if we weren't already drowning in acronyms, is an unavoidable consequence of large fingers moving on small touch screens.

Webmasters take heed: while richly-hyperlinked content works well on standard-sized monitors, overdoing one's link density creates a MICE mine field (because it's so ridiculously easy for users to click on an errant link). IntelliText-style text advertising (Yahoo has a lot of this) is particularly MICE-prone, because these links are barely visible on mobile browsers, and can be so easily activated by accident. As mobile usage increases, PPC marketers will have to incorporate the cost of MICE into that part of their paid search budget allocated to mobile platforms.

2. The Incredible Vanishing Right-Hand Page Element! Surfing the Web using the iPod is a joy, but I couldn't help noticing that I was spending most of my time zoomed into an area of Web pages closely corresponding with the familiar "Golden Triangle" area of SERPs. This area happens to be the "editorial sweet spot" on most Web sites, and it's typical that the newest and/or most important content elements occupy it. Consequently, I practically never saw (or at least paid attention to) any content on the right-hand side of the page. Ordinarily there's very little significant editorial content in the "right rail" area, but this real estate is often used by skyscraper format display advertising. Don't expect that anyone will notice your ads if they hang out in the right rail: what you should expect is that the iPod Touch/iPhone will usher in a whole new era of "phantom" display advertising, in which ads are served and billed without ever being seen by actual human eyes!

Perhaps you're confident in the quality and usability of your (or your client's) Web sites. But do yourself a favor and take a good hard look at how this site behaves using devices like the iPod Touch. My recommendation to webmasters suffering from overcrowded pages is to think beyond the old 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768 "no scroll" pixel templates, design pages that are taller and thinner (because scrolling is such a natural part of the iPod Touch experience and the right-hand areas are so easy to ignore), and place ads where they can be seen, not just counted and billed for.

3. Scarce Real Estate = Increased Competition For Mobile Visibility. When searching, the iPod Touch defaults to an embedded version of Google, whose home page resembles the familiar stripped down UI we're used to seeing on standard monitors. But there the resemblance sharply ends, because the dimensionally reduced SERPs offer radically reduced opportunities for showing PPC ads. There's no "right rail," and only one or two paid results (appearing on top of a short stack of organic results) can be accommodated within the browser's tight space constraints. Only when you bypass the embedded Google search and navigate to Google's home web page are the full range of PPC and organic links visible, but of course, you can't read them without zooming in.

Bottom line: if you think battling for SERP visibility is tough now, it's about to get much tougher. With only one (or at most two) competitors vying to dominate this radically scarce display space, mobile PPC bids may become unaffordable for many entrants used to competing using tertiary (#3 and below) listings. Given mobile's comparatively small share of the overall search query pie, this issue won't immediately impact big search spenders, but it's something to worry about (and prepare for) as devices like the iPod Touch and the iPhone become more users' primary information access and interaction device.