According to Google, no. While tablets are exceedingly portable, studies seem to suggest that they are carried around the house, moreso than being carried around town. In a 2012 Google study, the most pop­u­lar places to use tablets were, in order, on the couch, in bed, in the home, at the table, and in the kitchen. The first out-of-home loca­tion to make the list was the car, which occurred only 3% of the time. (I have to wonder if this will change with the growing popularity of the iPad mini, however)

Per­for­mance can vary sig­nif­i­cantly across smart­phones, tablets and desk­tops, across all ad types. Accord­ing to paid search data com­piled by Adobe, con­ver­sion rates for tablets are 20% higher than desk­tops, while smart­phones are 42% worse than desk­tops. If you fac­tor in that CPCs on tablets can be 30% lower than on desk­tops, paid search ROI on tablets is a whop­ping 70% bet­ter than desktops.

Of course, smartphone and tablet usage has been steadily increasing for the past 2 years. Com­bined, tablets and smart­phones already account for about 30% of all email opens that LiveIntent sees, and tablets are frequently top performers. 

Mar­keters want to exploit those per­for­mance dif­fer­ences and sep­a­rately tar­get tablets, smart­phones and desk­tops. How­ever, accord­ing to Google’s announce­ment today, adver­tis­ers will no longer be able to tar­get tablet users indi­vid­u­ally. Instead, tablets will be lumped in with desk­top users, while smart­phone users can be tar­get dif­fer­ently through Google’s new “Enhanced Cam­paign” setup.  Adver­tis­ers can no longer cre­ate sep­a­rate cam­paigns to target each device, but will instead need to add a mobile mod­i­fier at the cam­paign level to mod­ify bids on smart­phone traf­fic.

What about the ever-growing, top-performing tablet? Google is making a clear state­ment: not only are tablets NOT mobile, tablets ARE desktops.

While tablets really are used more like lap­tops or desk­tops than smart­phones, the motivation here may be more that tablet traf­fic is actu­ally converse to desktop: tablet traf­fic peaks pre­cisely when desk­top traf­fic drops. So by adding the two together, weakening desktop traffic appears more robust.

According to Adobe, “Cur­rently, CPCs are lower for tablets given that com­pe­ti­tion for tablet traf­fic is still rel­a­tively low (but increas­ing).  By lump­ing the higher per­form­ing tablet traf­fic in with desk­top traf­fic, rev­enue per search (RPS) will increase for Google as CPCs increase on the com­bined desk­top and tablet traf­fic. This, pre­sum­ably, will address Google’s mobile mon­e­ti­za­tion gap as an increas­ing share of searches is com­ing from tablets and smartphones.”

As tablets continue to gain market share (and time share) over other devices it will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Will tablets continue to mirror desktop? Overtake desktop? Or emerge as something totally different?