A the mobile market continues to bloom, it brings numerous attractive opportunities to advertisers. Millions of people use mobile devices on daily basis, and many of them could be your potential customers. This is why mobile ads are rapidly evolving, becoming a significant part of companies’ advertising strategies, and are striving for market dominance. After all, they offer a unique ability to reach your audience anywhere and anytime.
With the growing popularity of mobile ad formats, new questions arise, particularly about the aspects of tracking campaign effectiveness with Mobile Ad Servers. Despite the fact, that they have already established convenient ways to measure efficiency of mobile ads, there are still some obstacles to overcome.
Today, analytics of display ad campaigns are built around users’ clicks. They are an essential part of conversion tracking and ROI metrics. The margin of error with clicks on display ads is small enough to be considered insignificant, but the same can’t be said about mobile ads. As a matter of fact, the mobile ad market is troubled by the lack of metrics, and while it can benefit from experience with display ads, there are still some issues to resolve.
The root of the problem lies in the very nature of mobile devices. With smaller displays, users tend to click on banners accidentally and immediately bounce back from the advertiser’s landing page. While the number of clicks continues to be the main method of analyzing campaign effectiveness, these accidental visitors bring no conversions, and thus make the approach inaccurate. Although the exact percentages of accidental clicks remain debatable, the need for alternative and more accurate ways of measurement is evident. Things become even worse when the issue relates to brand-focused and interactive campaigns.
This is where post-click activity comes into focus. Linking the tracking of mobile impressions to actions is a challenging task, but it is not impossible. The rapid evolution of mobile ad markets is bound to bring about more options of post-click activity tracking. Recently, these methods have started becoming extremely sophisticated, showing exactly how audiences engage with a brand. This includes tracking installs, measuring mobile site conversions, and showing the true value of click-to-video campaigns.
Precise targeting and ad relevancy also help. They reduce the percentage of accidental clicks. With device, platform, social, behavioral and geo-targeting options, there are plenty of opportunities to serve your ads to specific people, who are likely to be interested in your product. Combining this with different pricing models (CPC, CPA, CPM or CPL) can provide you with excellent key performance indicators (KPI) to help measure your ad campaigns.
Moreover, mobile ad servers offer a large variety of metrics to analyze the effectiveness of mobile ads. This includes requests, impressions, CTR’s, eCPM’s, fill rates, conversion rates, unique users, revenue, etc. The analytics are served in real time, allowing advertisers to optimize their campaigns accordingly. With all these tools at the advertisers’ disposal, evaluating mobile ad efficiency quickly became an effortless process, yet the precision leaves much to be desired. Certainly the standards are evolving very quickly, but the main gap still remains, demanding for new solutions from the industry. Until those are developed, mobile ads might not show their true potential.
There is no doubt that mobile devices have already revolutionized online ad serving. Now, people are not bound to their PC’s and are reading news, communicating, and browsing the Web with their smartphones and tablets. Consumers’ media consumption habits have changed, bringing even more advertising opportunities. In the following years the mobile ad market will continue to evolve and mobile ads will play significantly greater role in overall marketing strategies. And while the budgets spent on the mobile ads are still comparatively small, advertisers are expanding their efforts to the promising mobile ad market.
About the Author: Marry Howard a content writer at Epom.com, a company that provides ad software for publishers and advertisers. She likes to write on marketing related topics.