I recently noticed that Google started a Mobile Ads guideline page. The following is of great interest to me:
“Follow proper grammar conventions.
You may use common text message abbreviations.”
I’d like to see some more detail about what is meant exactly by “You may use common text message abbreviations.”
The #1 result for “text message abbreviations” in Google currently has this web page. In a world where relevance is critical to click through and conversion rates, is an ad that has abbreviations that a viewer doesn’t understand certainly doesn’t meet the relevancy requirement as that viewer certainly won’t take action on an ad that he or she can not interpret. My preliminary thought is that this should allow the user to self select the type of mobile search marketing ad style that they are most comfortable with and this likely will have a strong correlation with the age of the user/ad viewer. But it also means that eventually you might need more than one style of mobile text ad, one with abbreviations and one without abbreviations. This is certainly an interesting area that I’m will likely see new standards and metrices over time.
What do you think the standards should be? I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts and discussion of this issue.