Check Your Mobile Ads in Google Chrome

If you search Google Images ‘mobile device market share,’ you’re bound to end up with a lot of outdated pie charts with dubious mentions of Nielsen and comScore. You’ll get the gist looking at the results. The market is really fragmented, and there’s not a great definition as to the actual split since new devices are introduced every few days.

In general, though, you can assume that most people are viewing your ads on one of two devices: an Apple iPhone, or (insert random model here) Android. While that is definitely the case, most marketers don’t carry around multiple device types to perform daily quality checks on digital ads. And, according to a highly scientific poll conducted by myself in five minutes, most of us prefer Apple mobile devices. So, inevitably, we end up asking the office’s token Android guy (we’ll call him Steve, for anonymity) this question a lot, ‘heyyyy Steve, could I borrow your phone for a minute to check if my app extension is live?’ Poor Steve gets asked this multiple times per day. It’s like owning a pickup truck, and everyone in the office wants to move to a new apartment. Every day.

Well, now you can let Steve do his work in peace. Here’s how in eight steps.

Open Google Chrome

Search for your client’s brand term (or whatever you want to see)

Click on the little hamburger menu at the top right of the window

Select ‘More Tools’

Click on ‘Developer Tools’ (the shortcut is option + command + I on a Mac)

Click the mobile icon at the top left of the developer tools pane

Select your preferred option from the device dropdown menu

Refresh the page to get the content to render according to the new device layout

To make the process even better, you can create a new Chrome user that opens a series of these checks every time its window opens. This makes for a very simple way to check mobile and desktop ad versions that won’t eat up more than a few minutes of your day.