Look around you and observe how many smartphones are in people’s hands these days. Look at what people are using in your office, on your next flight, on the street and you’ll see more smartphones in their hands than ever before. The iPhone is a huge hit and Android and Blackberry devices are just as strong. Consider these stats:

• IDC reports 174.2 million units were shipped in 2009, a 15% increase over 2008
• IDC reports smartphones accounted for 15% of all mobile phones in 2009, a 13% increase over 2008
• 55% of American adults connect to the internet wirelessly, either through a WiFi or WiMax connection via laptops or handheld devices like smartphones.

Recently, I was looking at a client’s Google Analytics reports to understand where traffic and sales were coming from. Among many things I wanted to learn about their visitors, I wanted to see how many were using mobile devices to browse the site and make a purchase. To see mobile device usage of your site, go to Visitors > Mobile > Mobile Devices. This client’s site is relatively new, yet, I was surprised to see the activity coming from mobile devices…not to mention the sales. This report allows you to see the operating system (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc.) of the smartphone. The iPhone is the leader for this particular site and when you add in the iPod numbers its even higher. Take a moment to log into your Google Analytics account to see this information for your site.

Seeing this information, I created a high priority to-do list to create a mobile campaign in AdWords and you may want to do the same. First, get an idea of the keywords used by mobile device users. In the Site Usage tab, you’ll see Operating System and to the right of that another drop down that says None. Choose Keyword from that dropdown and download the list of keywords. Study these keywords to discern patterns and user intent (if possible) then segregate them into your keyword buckets.

Next, setup your Mobile campaign in AdWords. Under ‘Networks, devices and extensions’ choose ‘iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers’ only. Its important to do this so you target only mobile users to enable future learnings and optimization for this user group. In the beginning, you might not have a lot of visitor data (as is the case for this client) to go off of so you’ll create a campaign with a broader focus (that is, targeting all operating systems on all carriers). As you gather data, you can optimize your mobile campaign to target users of specific operating systems and specific carriers.

Your keyword list will likely mimic the keywords you use to target desktop users. Be sure to include terms that convert into sales/leads and be aware of user intent. Follow the same campaign architecture as you created for desktop targeted campaigns, but, add the word ‘Mobile’ in the Campaign/AdGroup name. Carry over the same negative terms. As the campaign matures, use the ‘See Search Terms’ feature to see the actual queries and add (or exclude) them from the campaign/adgroup.

When building out your ads create two versions. The first version will be like your desktop targeted ads. Start of with the ad(s) you know performs best. The second version is a WAP browser optimized ad. WAP browsers are still out there and there’s limited space for your ad, but, you can include your business phone number. This is a great feature because the user can ‘click’ on the phone number to immediately place a call to your business. This is perfect because in many cases users may want to talk to your customer service reps instead of browsing your site on their device. These WAP optimized ads require more creativity because ad space is small.

As your campaign matures, watch analytics to see what mobile visitors are doing on your site and optimize the campaign to meet your business objectives.

Other considerations when targeting mobile users:

• Alert your customer service team, and, if possible, use a unique 800 number for mobile ads
• Create a mobile browser optimized landing page. Better yet, serve up a mobile optimized version of your entire site. Magento offers iPhone optimized sites
• Think about where mobile users might be looking for your site. Look at existing terms and look for patterns of intent and build on them