Protrainings launched a mobile site in December 2011 as it saw more traffic coming to the company’s Web site via handsets and wanted a better way to track sales. Protrainings worked with Google on these mobile efforts.

“In December 2011 we were starting to see an increase in consumers coming from mobile to access our services, but the experience was unable to be completed on mobile, so we made a more mobile-friendly site and put our videos on YouTube,” said Scott Andersen, co-founder of ProTrainings, Grand Rapids, MI.

Protrainings offers video-based training on health and safety courses, such as CPR and first aid certification.

Mobile saver
When Protrainings launched its mobile site, http://www.procpr.org, in 2011, the company also rolled out mobile search ads to direct users to an optimized experience.

Therefore, being able to track consumers across screens is critical.

Protrainings looked at its mobile users to see how they were completing their courses.

Per Google, 11 percent of mobile users started and finished the training course on their device. The other 89 percent of consumers started from a mobile device but completed the training from a PC or tablet.

To give mobile users an incentive to sign-up from the mobile site, Protrainings ran A/B testing with two different types of mobile search ads.

Protrainings offered consumers a $5 discount for signing up for a training course via the company’s mobile site. Another mobile ad did not offer consumers a discount.

The $5 offer was exclusive to mobile sales with a code, meaning that Protrainings could pinpoint exactly how mobile attributed to the company’s overall revenue regardless of where a consumer ultimately completed the training.

Per Google, the $5 coupon increased mobile-triggered sales by 35 percent.

Protrainings now attributes 12 percent of sales to mobile. Before December 2011, the company was not attributing any sales from mobile devices because there was not a way to track them.

“At this point, we are looking at mobile as being more important than it was before and for different ways,” Mr. Andersen said.

Cross-device sales
Based on Protrainings’ learnings, the company is possibly looking to develop mobile applications for its services, per Mr. Andersen.

A recent study from Google found that 55 percent of mobile search conversions happen in one hour (see story).

This means that consumers are on the hunt for quick information and want to immediately take an action.

“We live in a multiscreen world now, where people are constantly moving back and forth between devices,” said Brendon Kraham, director of global mobile sales and strategy at Google, Mountain View, CA.

“In fact, 90 percent of people use multiple screens sequentially to accomplish a task, so purchase paths increasingly involve interactions across multiple devices,” he said.

“In order to fully understand the customer journey, marketers need to better understand the interplay between devices and how they can create and measure a cross-device experience that achieves their goals.”

Final Take
Lauren  Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York