Mobile advertising fulfills potential with higher CPMs: report
Mobile advertising is living up to the hype as an effective marketing method, closing the divide with higher CPMs than desktop, according to a new report from PubMatic.
Marketers now have a better handle in targeting consumers via mobile through a variety of ad formats, causing the gap between mobile and desktop to diminish, with mobile seeing 34 percent higher CPMs than desktop. The report claims that mobile users have surpassed the amount of desktop users, which gives publishers and brands a bigger, more personal edge in connecting with consumers on the platform.
"Mobile advertising has proven to be an effective tool for B2C and B2B players across industries," said Michael Becker, managing partner at mCorids. "In a mobile world, marketers no longer need to buy media but rather they can buy a specific audience, wherever that audience actually is present across all media.
"They can narrowly target a specific audience, in-real time, based on any number of relevant attributes," he said. "For brands mobile advertising helps with building brand awareness and discovery, acquiring new people, re-engaging and re-targeting people and driving both online and offline content and commercial transactions.
"For media publishers its an effective source of traffic generation and revenue."
Mobile vs desktop
During the third quarter, PubMatic saw much more significant CPMs on mobile as compared to desktop, which leaves researchers to believe the mobile gap has been closed. A variety of factors are likely to be the cause of mobile ad success rates, such as improved technology and targeting capabilities and streamlined user experiences.
The research noted that mobile CPMs have grown 12 percent year-over-year, while desktop has only grown 10 percent. Mobile usage has primarily grown worldwide with North America and EMEA exhibiting CMP year over year increases of 17 percent and 47 percent, respectively.
Apple is proving to be an effective driver in these mobile ad revenues, with mobile ad impressions increasing 133 percent year over year compared to Android applications seeing increases of 42 percent.
Optimization is key
The quality of mobile optimization is substantially increasing, with user experiences becoming much more seamless with the growth of technology. The average CPM mobile-optimized Web sites increased 48 percent in inventory for the third quarter.
However, that number significantly fell for those not optimized for mobile platforms on these devices with a decline of 26 percent. Private marketplace CMPs saw inflated CPMs compared to those of non-private marketplace at 83.3 percent.
It seems as though marketers that have an accurate inventory of tools which leverage mobile effectively can target a bevy of consumers using this technology. A substantial amount of marketing experts predicted that mobile would be the platform to best serve marketers needs, and it seems that this may be that point in time.
Final take
Brielle Jaekel is editorial assistant at Mobile Marketer
"Brands, advertisers and their partners, looking to engage their target audience should most certainly include mobile, and mobile advertising in particular, in the heart of their advertising efforts," Mr. Becker said. "When building out marketing plans they should take into account a number of factors.
"They should have a clear sense of their business and campaign objectives and the type of people they want to reach," he said. "They should have a clear understanding of both their aspirational and actual consumer and have this insight inform their programs.
"They should understand that their media and network mix should vary depending on what they are looking to accomplish. They should recognize that not all mobile advertising solutions are alike or created equal."
Final take
Brielle Jaekel is editorial assistant at Mobile Marketer