Mobile Health » mobilegroove

This week the Carnival of the Mobilists – the weekly line-up of the best blogs and bloggers on all things mobile – comes to us via Andy Favell over at MobiThinking, a valuable resource with a good selection of mobile advertising stats, reports and white papers. Between Andy's outreach for old and new Mobilists to submit posts –and my eager tweets (@COTMobilists) encouraging more people to get involved – the COM attracted a whopping 40+ submissions(!). Thanks to Andy for his extra attention to collecting and ranking posts leaving us with the 10+ posts that made the grade.

GOOGLE'S NEW KEYWORD TOOL SHARES SEARCH VOLUMES for the first time. AcuraCast road tests the tool (currently in beta), which provides mobile website owners and mobile search marketing agencies the ability to estimate PPC costs and traffic volumes they can expect from mobile search. A quick review of mobile search volumes shows even the most popular keywords we know from the Web aren't crowd-pleasers in mobile. For categories such as local information and gaming, the post says, the volume of mobile searches is "a mere fraction – as low as 0.3% – 0.6% of traditional Web searches for the same 1-word keyword queries." Source The bottom line: Finally Google reveals the terms that deliver results in mobile search. But mobile search usage is still lagging, no doubt due to a laundry-list of universal shortcomings MSearchGroove has analyzed in this recent post. The new Google Keywords Tool is good news for marketers and publishers, but another proof that mobile search as a service has a way to go. Peggy adds: Or does it simply underline the pivotal importance of content discovery – not mobile search - as a primary means to explore the wealth of content at our finger tips and find what we are likely to appreciate? *** MORE THAN HALF OF INDIAN COLLEGE STUDENTS USE THE MOBILE WEB, says a new survey from Indian mobile ad firm InMobi, and a third of the students engage with brands that advertise online. The students' favorite sites to visit on their mobile devices are search engines, news sites and social networks, and the company says that mobile internet usage is spread across a multitude of income groups. Source The bottom line: More evidence pointing to the popularity of the mobile internet in emerging markets, and the ability of mobile ads to reach consumers there.