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.

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

More in Media

The Creator Economy

The Independent bets big on individual talent-led verticals with the launch of Independent Studio

April 2, 2025

The U.K.-based digital news publisher has signed YouTube creator Alan Clery as creative director to kick off the launch of Independent Studios, a unit that will produce a new crop of individual talent-led videos, newsletters and podcasts.

The Creator Economy

Creators are ditching Substack over ideological shift in 2025

April 1, 2025

The writers who left Substack in early 2025 represent a second wave after an initial burst of Substack creators left the platform in January 2024.

Digiday Publishing Summit

How Dotdash Meredith enlisted OpenAI to boost its contextual ad product, with Lindsay Van Kirk

April 1, 2025

Dotdash Meredith’s gm of D/Cipher discussed the publisher’s OpenAI deal in a live recording of the Digiday Podcast at last week’s Digiday Publishing Summit.