The era of paid mobile search is dawning

Paid mobile search is a very new concept here in the UK, but our friends ‘across the pond’ have already started making serious investment in this area.

A report released last week from banking and investment firm Macquarie Group shows that nearly five per cent of paid search spending in the United States is now allocated to paid mobile search. Assuming this growth continues at the same rate, that figure will be 10 per cent by the end of the year.

The 2010 Paid Search Agencies Buyer’s Guide suggests the UK could soon match the US’s level of investment in this area, stating that 2011 “could well be the year of mobile paid search”. The report estimates that the total value of the paid search market in the UK is £3.2bn, so a five or ten percent share of that would represent a significant total investment in paid mobile search.

The main reason paid mobile search is such an attractive form of PPC advertising is its immediacy. Surojit Chatterjee is PM Lead, Search and Local Mobile Ads at Google. He explained that conversion rates among mobile users were likely to be higher than that among PC users because of the time-sensitive nature of many mobile search enquiries: “Mobile users are more prone to take immediate action. People searching on mobile have a higher intent,” he said. “The time between intent and action has been narrowed.”

We think paid mobile search is going to be the next big thing in PPC advertising. You heard it here first …