Google is launching a new initiative to help small-to-medium sized businesses create mobile websites.
Google Sites Mobile Landing Pages - Google Mobilize for short - is being announced today at the company's Think Mobile conference in London. It provides templates for SMEs to create and launch mobile landing pages.
Unusually for Google, it is launching first in the UK, rather than the US. The impetus for the new tool was Google's research showing that 28% of British mobile users have used their phone to make a purchase.
"Lots of people are buying on a smartphone, but what we're not seeing is lots of people have mobile-enabled websites making it easy for people to buy on their phone," said Ian Carrington, Google's mobile advertising sales director for northern and central Europe, in a press briefing before the conference.
"It's the biggest barrier today for m-commerce, and they are losing out to people who do have mobile-optimised websites. Only 17% of the businesses that we work with today have a mobile-optimised website."
Google Mobilise is free for businesses to use, although for Google the payoff will come if they become customers for the company's mobile AdWords platform.
Carrington also addressed the question of apps versus mobile web, stressing that Google is not taking a side in the debate, but that businesses may be focusing too much on native apps and not enough on their mobile websites.
"We would generally encourage people to have both," he said. "A lot of people have an application strategy and not a mobile web strategy."
Carrington also outlined some statistics on UK mobile usage, claiming that 36% of the UK population now own a smartphone, with 20 million people connecting to the web from their mobile phone - up from 14 million in 2010.
"53% of people who own a smartphone [in the UK] are using it while watching TV," he said. "We call this phenomenon dual-screening: they could be playing a game, checking their emails, texting a friend..."
Carrington also said that Google has noticed a definable trend of viewers seeing an advert on TV, and then turning to their smartphone or tablet to find out more about the product or brand.
"We want advertisers to start integrating mobile into the whole of their communications piece," he said.
"The simplest thing they can do is make the strapline and message exactly the same - if they're advertising something on TV with a message, it should be the same on mobile."
Other stats revealed by Carrington at the event from Google's UK research included the fact that 24% of British smartphone owners use their phones for comparing product price while in shops.
Meanwhile, Google's Android Market app store has now reached 4.5 billion total downloads. "A year ago that was one billion, and that first billion took two years to happen," said Carrington. "The last billion took 60 days."
