Not surprisingly, Valentine’s Day spurred lots of last-minute Web searches and phone calls — and the Google mobile ads team just published a blog post highlighting how much of that activity happened on smartphones and tablets.
For one thing, last-minute searches for national restaurant chains grew across-the-board, but they grew the most on smartphones — between February 7 and February 14, these searches increased 359 percent on mobile, compared to 142 percent from desktop computers and 135 percent on tablets. (These statistics are all for the United States.) In total, mobile made up 62 percent of those searches on Valentine’s Day.
People were also more likely to search for flowers from their phones, and to select the “click to call” or “get directions” options in florists’ ads — mobile searches for flower-related terms increased by 227 percent, direction requests increased 514 percent, and people became 560 percent more likely to “click to call.”
While those numbers are impressive, they make intuitive sense. Here’s something that’s a little more surprising: Searches for dating sites Match.com and eHarmony increased more for tablets than for desktops and smartphones. I guess lonely folks preferred to curl up on their couch or bed with their iPads as they looked for love.
Not that I’d know anything about that.
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...
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