“In the middle of last year around 7% of all searches were generated by mobile devices. This is indeed an accelerated rise and mobile searches have reached closed to 15% of the total,” Doina Costache says.
“We have currently reached five times as many searches in 2013 against 2010. Figures speak for themselves,” she adds.
Google does not offer any data on its traffic or revenues in Romania, but most likely the search engine has over three million unique users – the number of users of the most visited local websites for which there is traffic data – and tens or hundreds of millions of visits. According to Statcounter data, Google had a 97% share of the online search engines in March in Romania, with Microsoft’s Bing being no. 2 with less than 1%.
The accelerated rise of smartphone searches comes amid rising sales of devices and amid changes in client behavior.
“In December last year three out of four mobile phones sold were smartphones, according to data we have from mobile phone operators.”
Last year’s estimates point to sales of one million smartphones last year from 600,000 in 2011. This year Gersim, the largest local distributor of mobile phones, estimates smartphone sales could rise 50%.
As the number of smartphones has increased, reaching a penetration rate of 15% of the total population in 2012, and users have also started to buy mobile services data, data search behavior has also changed.
“One single user is connected to several devices at the same time: for instance they have a TV turned on, and they use the smartphone to search for additional information about something they saw on TV.”
Google data on mobile device searches only considers smartphones and excludes tablets, Doina Costache explains.
She says Google has noticed that gradually users have started to use tablets as they use desktops, so the company does not consider tablets mobile devices. Instead it includes them in the same category as netbooks, laptops and desktops because they are much more static devices.
“Smartphones had a 15% penetration rate in Romania in 2012 and tablets had a 3% penetration, so we treat them differently from the outset.”
Clients’ focus towards smartphones is a growth opportunity for companies as well, and Google – a company whose revenues come from online advertising – made changes to the way its clients can publish ads through Google’s network of partner websites in order to allow the former to identify more potential clients.
In Romania around 20,000 websites accept ads from Google. The ads of Google clients are also displayed next to the search results of internet users.
Google has made changes to the way its clients can run campaigns so as to adjust them to the user’s context and to make it easier for mobile devices to be included in the campaigns, according to Doina Costache.
She says through this change Google does not force clients to also pay for smartphone ads.
“Beforehand, when a client wanted to be present with ads both on desktops and on smartphones they had to make two separate campaigns. If they wanted to also add location extensions and click-2-call extensions, they had to make separate settings for each campaign.”
She says that since Google clients are interested in being reached by users from no matter which device, these campaigns have been improved.
“Clients make one single campaign in their account and just tick several options so that, for instance, after six o’clock they are present on mobile devices rather than on desktops,” Doina Costache explains.
(English version by Daniela Stoican)