February requests increase in AdMob network

By Mickey Alam Khan

March 17, 2008

Jason Spero is vice president of marketing at AdMob

Given a shorter month, impressions on the AdMob mobile ad network decreased 2.2 percent to 2.32 million, according to the company’s latest metrics report.

However, requests increased 2.5 percent to 2.56 million for February, vs. 2.5 million for January, per the AdMob Mobile Metrics Report. Interestingly, 17.3 percent of ad requests in the AdMob network worldwide were from smartphones.

“There has been a great deal written about the use of smartphones to consume data services,” the AdMob report said. “Between the iPhone, Research In Motion, Nokia N Series, Palm and Windows devices, there are more models of smartphones in the market than ever before.”

In other findings, British requests grew 23.9 percent in February vs. January, outpacing AdMob network growth despite a shorter month.

AdMob found that the fill rates were 90.6 percent for February vs. 95 percent for January.

The key devices in AdMob’s top 5 markets remained the same.

For example, it was the Motorola KRZR in the United States, the Nokia 6030 in India, Motorola v360 in South Africa, Sony Ericsson K800i in Britain and Nokia 6600 in Indonesia.

“In February we added share trends by manufacturer,” said Jason Spero, vice president of marketing at AdMob, San Mateo, CA.

“This is a bit skewed because we were able to ID new devices this month, especially in the U.S., so it is not apples to apples,” he said. “But tracking these trends is where we want to head with this report.”

The surprising finding was traffic on the iPhone, which was a highly gifted item over the holidays.

“IPhone traffic flattened a bit in February in the U.S.,” Mr. Spero said. “This seems consistent with the theory that people use their new device a great deal in January and then slow down a bit. It will be interesting to see March numbers.”

Please click here for access to the AdMob Mobile Metrics Report.