Tio Mobile was held in Leeds on the 27th, the event focused on mobile, mainly technical but we touched on so many subjects between 4pm and 8pm when we left for the (next pub). Some incredible attendees made the event fantastic if you wanted to develop knowledge on any aspects of mobile.
Despite Google referring to 2017 as the year of the mobile, and mobile first SEO wasn’t the main topic of focus, or at least not classical, the most interesting aspects were around some of the more recent developments such as Progressive Web Apps and AMP – with a room full of expert marketers, several of whom had implemented functions of both it was interesting how new many of us were to these technologies.
“The faster your website loads on mobile phones, the faster your visitors will go through your content. Better user experience alone is a good reason to AMP up your website.” – Omi Sido
Omi Sido offered us some insights into AMP from his experience in news publishing SEO where this has been positively received, however Most of us agreed that AMP is a bad solution to a bad problem – webpages are too large, slow loading, overloaded with ads and scripts, but the solution of limited scripts & limited code, which rather than making the web faster makes some landing pages faster, it works for news but it doesn’t solve the real problem. Who owns the website, who is responsible for making sure the ad scripts, the analytics, the content, the components of the webpage which all have an impact. It is a technical problem sadly impacted by not very technical people. Mike discussed whether affiliates should be using AMP more.
One of the biggest issues highlighted by Malcolm Slade from Epiphany talked about how we aren’t developing or really thinking mobile first yet, or at least very few companies are.
“We took the bad code from desktop and with the help of CSS, we turned it into responsive” Malcolm Slade
Progressive Web Apps were some of the most exciting discussion points, with Andy Veal leading this area of discussion. We initially talked through the opportunities, what can we do with them, the most interesting part felt like it was the offline capabilities, which of course led us to discuss how this could be tracked.
Al Wightman & Rick Harrison leading us through some solutions, but we agreed that the problems of mobile attribution, they weren’t going to be cracked…
Arianne Donoghue led the conversation on paid strategies, from mobile extensions to bid modifiers.
“There’s increasing amounts of talk about voice search and how to optimise your paid campaigns for voice, but it doesn’t yet look like we’re seeing this behaviour from users. We’re the touch-screen generation – we may have to wait for the younger generation who are accustomed to using voice as a primary form of input to have more influence in the market. Lack of transparency from Google on what queries are voice-driven isn’t helping things here either!”
Finally Martin brought up one an issue with mobile security, not typically discussed –
“Cyber Security is a hot topic at the moment, and with GDPR in May fast approaching more businesses are now starting to take steps to address security holes.“
Martin flagged just how much personal data is now being stored and sent through mobile phones. Despite so many websites having unsecure websites (including rather embarrassingly many Digital Agencies …). Fun in the night
As ever, it was great fun, with a quiz to start off with – Malcolm Slade took an early lead but Omi caught up with him, before finally they were both pipped by Al Wightman, who seems to have an expert knowledge of the oddities within the test that Tom Bourlet created.
The second competition, people shared one of their last three pics on their mobile phone, some very bizarre entries with Tom Black shire winning with … well, let’s call it a selfie.
Post event drinks in Aire Bar overlooking the Leeds Canal. Bar Soba, great food and a great venue – massive thanks as it was a great location picked out by SALT.agency.
Thanks as well to the contribution of photos from Omi Sido & Chris Taylor
