Google's Enhanced Campaigns an opportunity to do Mobile Ads the right way with Mobile Landing Pages

Google recently announced Enhanced Campaigns. Much has been said about it on both sides of the fence and if one should upgrade now or wait till it becomes inevitable.

Nevertheless with this change, it is at the very least making every Adword advertiser to think through the process of allocating some of every campaign budget to target mobile devices. While it may seem like  early days for Mobile, a recent article in NYTimes that about 25% of visits occur via mobile indicates that today, a business ignores mobile at their own peril.

With this change,  one can indicate if an Ad should be targeted at a mobile device.  Which is a good thing, as we would argue that a Mobile Ad must always be different from a desktop Ad for two main reasons:

• the landing page experience should be mobile optimized.
• singular focus: while desktop website ads can be a bit more generic, mobile is mostly about doing one task at a time, as easily as possible. So both the mobile ad and it’s mobile landing page experience should be much more focussed.

Just as with QR codes, a Google search on a mobile does not do justice if it gets leads to a page designed to be viewed on a desktop. A page that is properly formatted for a mobile goes a long way towards getting someone to register their interest for your service or purchase outright.

Some of our clients have started to use the Qryptal platform to create mobile landing pages that are used on mobile Ad networks with good results.  A great example is Xpressflower.com. Before Valentine’s Day their mobile ads landed visitors on their Valentine’s Day flower ordering pages. Users could not only get the information but also complete the entire transaction (including payment) on their phone within a few minutes.

Not surprisingly, a page designed for mobile leads to better results on a mobile.  Such a page typically has form elements that are designed for touch entry and with intuitive form entry elements such as bringing up the numeric keypad when entering a phone number.

So if you’re an advertiser on Google or an Advertising/Marketing agency and faced with updating your Adword campaign, it’s a good time to look at platforms such as Qryptal to quickly create effective mobile landing pages. We would be happy to share our experience.

Bulk Database Integrated QR Codes with Mobile Page Template

There are many bulk QR Code generation services out there. These are mostly just about creating a bunch of QR Codes based on static information.

After working with many customers we realized that some customers need something special: generate bulk codes along with mobile pages to convey specific information about lots of objects.

An example use case would be a wine retailer wanting to use QR Codes. They need a QR Code with a linked mobile page to convey the information about each specific wine. The issue is that individually creating so many mobile pages is tedious and soon the project becomes unviable.

Another example is that of an appliance manufacturer. They want a QR Code for every model of appliance, which when scanned provides access to the user guide of the specific appliance model along with service information: phone numbers, location of service centre, opening hours etc. The service information is common to all appliances but the guides are different for every appliance model. Again the same issue: How to efficiently create a QR Code for every model ?

Yet another use case is in Museums. Here they wish to create a QR Code for every exhibit to link it to relevant online resources to make the experience more enriching for visitors. Most of the information is unique but once you create thousands of such mobile pages and QR Codes - changing something common (say a link to museum contact information) to all of them would be a lot of work!!!

Similar use cases exist in healthcare, public information,........ the list is endless.

Qryptal has been working to bring an elegant solution to the market to solve this problem and this post outlines the solution. It is really easy:

1. Create a spreadsheet for all the different products (or exhibits etc) with the unique information encoded in different columns. Example:

2. Create a template on the Qryptal Mobile page designer. You can put all the common information in the template and put the spreadsheet column name for the variable information:

3. Now just click on the "Sync Spreadsheet" button on the Qryptal interface and it will:

• Create a unique QR Code for every row. Just print and use. 
• Sync all the unique information, so that when someone scans the QR Code, they get the information from the template combined with the information in the spreadsheet.

4. On going maintenance is equally easy:

• Update info: Just change the content in the spreadsheet and Sync
• Add more items: Just add to spreadsheet and Sync

We think this is a really great solution which makes QR Codes viable for many such use cases. For more information:

Free QR Code with Mobile Page Plan Announcement

Back when we founded Qryptal, we had a vision for everyone using QR Codes everywhere in a useful way. Not just the big marketing departments but EVERYONE for all kind of purposes - making life easy for end users and creators alike.

Why did we decide to offer a free plan:

All too frequently we came across badly done QR Codes. We talked to some of the folks about it and generally the response was: "we are not sure if QR Codes would work for us, so we decided to use one of the free QR code generators on the web to try out". 

Since most free QR code generators just create a code to a desktop landing page, the end user ended up having a poor experience when they scanned these QR codes. 

We had stumbled upon a chicken and egg problem. Folks creating sub-optimal QR Codes leading to poor scanning experiences leading to a lot of folks not being sure if QR codes are working for them. 

The Qryptal Free plan is our attempt to encourage everyone to use QR Codes the right way.

What is included in the free plan?

2 QR Codes with associated mobile landing pages and 100 views (about 100 people scanning your codes) per month. The mobile pages can include nearly all the functionality of the Qryptal platform: Smart Image resizing, Videos, Slide shows, Lists, Locators, Buttons and basic Forms. 

We think this strikes the right balance in terms of letting customers get into QR codes the right way as well as our need for revenue to run the service smoothly and continue to innovate.

See the slideshow below for some examples of what amazing stuff you can do with this and dazzle your customers.

So start generating QR codes the right way with Qryptal for free and start paying when it starts working for you! 

QRCode generator and mobile page designer update

It has been very busy last few weeks at Qryptal and we have now started rolling out the stuff that we have been working on (actually we silently rolled out some of this stuff earlier). 
Enhanced QR Code generator output:

• 300 dpi high resolution output: Now all codes are 300 dots per inch.
• EPS vector output:  All codes also come with the vector Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) version of the code. Makes it easy to scale and incorporate in your print graphics.

New Version2 Mobile page designer:

This has been a major project and now we have started rolling out our next generation mobile page designer. Above are some sample pages that you can create with the new designer.

The V2 designer has many new features:

• Many different types of elements: Our earlier V1 designer had only 5 types of elements: Logo, Image, Text and buttons (Call, E-mail, Download). In V2 we already have 31 elements and this number will keep on increasing because the V2 framework makes it very easy to add new elements. New elements include Video, Image Carousel etc. Some new elements have become available today and the rest would become available in the next few weeks.
• Flexible layout engine: In V1 - the order of elements was fixed. Now you have nearly full flexibility in both order and number of elements.
• New Container Elements: You can create containers which can include other elements. For example Image Carousel is a container which includes other Images.
• Page Element Properties: V1 was like Model T - you can have any page background color as long as it is white. Similarly only black buttons were supported. In V2 - you can set a background color for the entire page and choose background and font color for the buttons.
• Efficiency and Performance: We have added all these capabilities with a keen focus on performance. So most of the complexity has been loaded on the front-end (when you design) but when someone scans your QR Code, it remains as efficient as ever.
• Templates: The V2 designer now supports the concept of templates. When you create a new code - you can select a close fit from the template library and then customize it to fit your needs. We think this is must with so many options.

Here is a screenshot of the Template Browser:

To try all this, just log-in at www.qryptal.com and click on Create QR Code:

The V2 designer provides us the foundation to add new capabilities very rapidly. This would enable our customers to roll out great and effective QR Code campaigns with little effort. 

We would also like to thank all our customers for their great feedback - a lot of which has been channeled into the new designer.