Category — Mobile Advertising

In its latest “SMART” report, Millennial Media looks into the various targeting options available for US mobile advertisers and has also measured the average cost incurred to acquire an engaged user. According to this report, here are the various mobile ad campaign targeting options and the share of budget it constitutes

Run-of-Network : 38%
Channel : 22%
Demographic : 20%
Custom Subnet : 15%
Audience : 4%
Takeover : 2%

Average Cost of acquiring an engaged user
Behavioral : $1.38
Takeover : $0.50
Demographic : $0.25
Channel : $0.21
Custom Subnet : $0.20
Run-of-Network : $0.12

At a time when marketers have been contemplating how the marketing budget should be allocated between traditional and online advertising channels, there appears to be a serious need for thought about how the new media advertising itself should be allocated. According to a recent study by a research firm, InsightExpress, mobile advertising brings far more ROI than online advertising.

The following study results were measured with online advertising as benchmark.

Mobile Internet Advertising
Unaided awareness : 9 percentage points above Online advertising
Aided awareness : 9 percentage points
Ad awareness : 24 percentage points
Overall : 12 percentage points

SMS Advertising
Unaided awareness : 5 percentage points
Aided awareness : 10 percentage points
Ad awareness : 18 percentage points
Overall : 7 percentage points

Mobile Video Advertising
Unaided awareness : 5 percentage points
Aided awareness : 10 percentage points
Ad awareness : 18 percentage points
Overall : 13 percentage points

Cumulatively, mobile advertising is seen to be 4.5 – 5 times better in delivering ROI than online advertising.

Millennia Media’s Q4 ‘09 report on the biggest spenders on mobile advertising has some interesting pointers. Unlike the online medium where Financial services rule the roost, mobile advertising has telecommunications and directories become the major spenders. Here are the top ten mobile advertisers by vertical

1. Portals and Directories
2. Telecommunications
3. Finance
4. Entertainment
5. Dating
6. Retail and Restaurants
7. Consumer Packaged Goods
8. Travel
9. Education
10. Automotive

Splitting up the travel vertical itself, we see 50% of the spending is from hotels, 28% by airlines, 14% by railways and 8% by the tourism sector.

The AdMob acquisition has given Google the chance to turn their ad network into a powerhouse on the mobile space as well. According to a research by IDC, the revenues of the two companies in 2009 constituted over 25% of the entire mobile ad market. Here are the biggest mobile ad networks in the US by revenue

1. Millennial Media : $51 million
2. AdMob : $40 million
3. Yahoo : $32 million
4. Google : $28 million
5. Microsoft : $23 million
6. Quattro Wireless : $21 million
7. JumpTap : $11 million
8. AOL : $7 million
Others : $9 million

To compare this with our earlier list based on unique visitors written back in August 2009, click here.

Is the mobile operating system a factor while determining the kind of CTR that ads receive? Apparently it does. Symbian users tend to click on ads much more frequently than Blackberry users. User sophistication could be a factor, but then the iPhone records a high CTR as well.

A study conducted by mobile advertising company Smaato fixed the average ad CTR for all mobile phones at 100 and ranked the CTR of individual platforms based on this index. Here are the results

Symbian : 161
iPhone : 119
Windows Mobile : 112
Feature phones : 84
Android : 65
WebOs : 28
Blackberry : 26

SMS advertising is the biggest constituent of the mobile ad revenues currently. We already saw how Display and Search advertising could take over from SMS by 2013. A new study shows a slightly different share from what was projected by the Kelsey group. This one’s from Coda Research

2009
SMS : 61%
Display : 14%
Search : 25%

2013
SMS : 28%
Display : 21%
Search : 51%

2015
SMS : 3%
Display : 27%
Search : 70%

Coda has given SMS a few extra years to live.

Today a predominant number of mobile advertisers are doing so with the help of SMS. That could change in less than five years thanks to the proliferation of 3G and 4G in this time period. Here is how the different medium pan out as of now, and how they will look like by 2013

2008 Value : $160 million
Display : 13%
Search : 24%
SMS : 63%

2013 Value : $3.1 billion
Display : 16%
Search : 73%
SMS : 9%

As you can see from the value of the market, it is not that SMS advertising is declining, but the search advertising market is seen to grow exponentially.