Rachel Pasqua, Director of Mobile Marketing for iCrossing, discusses keyword based paid search for mobile devices.

You’d think that paid search would be the easiest place for newbie mobile marketers to start. It’s a familiar business model after all – you’d be hard pressed to find a marketer who hasn’t dabbled in it. It doesn’t pose any of the technical roadblocks of mobile web dev or the expense of building apps. In fact, if you haven’t opted out, you’re actually in – for quite some time Google has automatically opted desktop campaigns in for inclusion on devices with full HTML browsers, like the iPhone.

Yet few brands have taken full advantage of keyword based paid search on mobile devices and this is due in no small part to the lack of clarity surrounding mobile keywords. The line between desktop and mobile natural search has long been a gray area with SEMs and mobile pundits arguing incessantly over the finer points of users behavior – are their queries longer? Shorter? Does their terminology differ? All questions that have been pretty much impossible to answer with the tools that exist to serve the needs of desktop SEO. The only reliable resource in existence was the Google Mobile Keyword tool but accessing it was a bit labor intensive. Instead of being openly available like the regular desktop tool, users had to log into their AdWords account and create a mobile specific ad, then access the keyword tool for search volume and suggestions.

Thankfully Google as seen the light and has made a move towards making the process much easier. The new AdWords console offers a much more direct method of accessing the keyword tool within any campaign and integrates some of the other interesting new assets Google has been debuting like Google Insights for Search and options to filter for country and industry specific data. It also presents estimated CPCs – something that was impossible to gauge for mobile up until now. But best of all, it presents mobile search volumes, for the first time giving search marketers a clear sense of the opportunity that exists. For those of us who’ve been on the fence about how deeply to commit to mobile search campaigns, this new tool provides solid justification. It also shows an encouraging new level of openness on Google’s part. The company has been notoriously reticent on the amount of traffic coming from mobile search. Opening up this kind of data to the public validates for the first time the numbers are there in significant volume.

You may be able to easily try it out for yourself by accessing a campaign in your AdWords account and clicking on the “opportunities” tab – a beta link for the new tool should appear. Mysteriously though, the tool isn’t directly available to everyone so in case you’re not among the lucky few, here’s a workaround – access the following URL, replacing the account and campaign numbers with your own:

https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__u=ACCOUNT&__c=CAMPAIGN