Mobile Targeting Lags Behind Online

By Carla Rover • July 1, 2011 •

Mobile advertising is still just a blunt instrument for most brands.

In fact less than half of advertisers — 49 percent — employed any targeting parameters at all when serving mobile ads, according to a recent analysis of 11 billion ad impressions delivered by the mobile advertising technology firm Jumptap.

Among the multitude of options available, Jumptap found advertisers most frequently chose to target campaigns to specific types of phones, such as smartphones. Far fewer looked to take advantage of mobile’s unique location based-targeting capabilities (26 percent, per Jumptap), or even more basic targeting factors like age (12 percent) and country (8 percent).

That’s in sharp contrast to a recent report on non-mobile campaigns by Corona Insights, which showed that more than half of the online marketers from leading agencies surveyed targeted local audiences in their ad campaigns.

One reason that more advertisers are not employing targeting parameters in a mobile campaigns might be that they view mobile as strictly a means to drive traffic to their brand sites. Approximately 60 percent of advertisers used their mobile campaigns to simply display a click-to-website button, without offering any immediate call-to-action such as a click-to-call.

But that state of affairs is changing, said CMO Paran Johar, as advertisers begin to see the value of the mobile marketing as a core part of overall marketing strategy.

“Mobile, like PC web-based advertising, is very measurable,” Johar said. “The beauty of mobile advertising is the personal nature of the medium and thus relevancy of message is hypercritical. By leveraging targeting data to reach your audience you increase the engagement you have with the consumer.”

Among the other interesting nuggets Jumptap unearthed from its research: middle-aged users are more likely to click-thru ads than their younger counterparts, as are consumers with incomes above $50,000.

In addition, men are more than 50 percent more likely to click on ads than women. And Apple devices have almost double the click-thru rate of Android devices.

The research also revealed that, not surprisingly, consumers are most likely to engage with mobile advertising during the midday hours and that click through rates are at their lowest during the morning commute.

More in Media

Inside the C-suite

Forbes launches dynamic AI paywall as it ramps up post-search commercial diversification plans

November 14, 2025

For the latest Inside the publisher C-Suite series, Digiday spoke to Forbes CEO Sherry Phillips on its AI-era playbook, starting with its AI-powered dynamic paywall to new creator-led commercial opportunities.

The Creator Economy

Creators embrace Beehiiv’s push beyond newsletters

November 14, 2025

Creators are embracing Beehiiv’s new website, product and analytics tools to help them grow beyond the competitive newsletter space.

Member Exclusive

Media Briefing: Publishers turn to paid audience acquisition tactics to tackle traffic losses

November 13, 2025

Publishers facing declining organic traffic are buying audiences through paid ads and traffic arbitrage, and using AI tools to do it.