Google Launches “Full Value Of Mobile” Calculator To Help Businesses Measure Online And Offline Impact Of Mobile Marketing

The market for mobile advertising is forecast to reach $11.4 billion this year on the back of explosive growth in smartphones and tablets, but companies like Google, currently the world leader in mobile advertising, are all too aware of a big issue that could trouble the industry longer-term: there aren’t enough tools out there for businesses to measure how effective their campaigns are relative to actual sales. So the search giant is taking the bull by the horns and rolling out a new service to combat that: a calculator, called the Full Value of Mobile, that helps businesses that use Google’s mobile advertising services — specifically using AdWords — to measure how their mobile marketing translates into actual business, both online and offline.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Google’s calculator is launching on the same day that local listings service Yelp is releasing its own estimating tool for small businesses to measure the impact that Yelp is having on their business. It’s like the old saying about buses.

Google has already made some efforts in this space, for example by extending AdWords analytics into mobile, but as Johanna Werther, head of Mobile Ads Marketing, notes in a blog post, “with more work to be done to improve measurement tools, most marketers still account only for sales happening on a mobile site and aren’t seeing the full picture.”

The calculator, she says, provides “simple equations and benchmarks” that speak to different aspects of a mobile marketing campaign. For example, how many people phone you as a result of an ad (using Google’s automatic dialling feature); and what impact is a cross-device campaign having versus one across a single platform? The metrics, in a sense, bring into context the many features that Google has been building out for the platform, and provide a way for businesses to better access those analytics. This is important for small businesses in particular, who may not have the budgets for larger campaigns and teams of people to do this work for them.

Google claims that the set-up for using the new calculator takes only about 30 minutes, and other metrics that are revealed include total value, value per click, and ROI for a campaign. “You’ll also see how cost-effective your mobile CPAs are,” Werther notes.