Mobile Targeting Lags Behind Online

July 1, 2011 | By Carla Rover

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.

https://digiday.com/?p=3909

Digiday Top Stories

Marketing on Platforms
Marketers weigh the cons of working with Google Ad Manager amid Justice Department’s new lawsuit
When is it time to back away?
Navigating Economic Instability
Atlas Obscura wants to be profitable before raising funds in a tricky media market
Atlas Obscura wants to turn a profit this year before it raises another funding round, at a time when publishers are facing lower valuations and pickier investors as deal activity slows.
Navigating Economic Instability
Publishers report Q1 ad revenue is pacing 10-25% behind forecasts
Publishers are facing a slow start to Q1 and sales teams have a lot of work to do to regain lost time.
Sponsored
How ad tech is tackling waste by optimizing supply chains
Sponsored by Bidtellect The programmatic and digital advertising industry is well aware of the inefficiencies in buying and selling — from auction duplication and volume bias to multi-integrations and reselling — but how did it get this out of control? How can we fix it? A redundant, multiple-step process to ad delivery has become the norm, […]
WTF Series
WTF is cookie stuffing?
Fraud is a well-documented pox on digital advertising, but it’s also an issue for publishers and marketers working together on affiliate marketing deals, too. One of the more tried-and-true techniques is cookie stuffing.
Subscriptions
Bloomberg, Axios, Politico, other business publishers rethink subscriber retention during the economic downturn
Premium publishers, like POLITICO, Axios and Bloomberg, have to make sure their fees are still considered a necessity as readers recalculate their spending and companies recalculate their expense budgets.