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Financial services advertisers are diverse in mobile campaign targeting methods

There has been tremendous growth in the financial services vertical on Millennial Media?s ad network as brands look to reach the growing number of banking customers leveraging mobile to manage their finances. 

The financial services vertical has consistently placed in the top 10 mobile advertising verticals on Millennial Media?s network for the last year. Further, ABI Research predicts that there will be almost 500 million mobile banking customers in 2013.

?This month, we took a closer look at the financial services vertical on our network,? said Mack McKelvey, senior vice president of marketing at Millennial Media, Baltimore, MD. ?In 2010, financial services advertisers have been increasingly active with the mobile channel. 

?In fact, we saw an 802 percent increase year over year in this vertical,? she said. ?We?re seeing signs today that traditional online advertisers such as tax preparers, and hazard insurance companies, will include mobile into their media mix in 2011.?

Millennial Media is a mobile advertising network that continues to reach more than eight out of 10 ? or 76 million of the nearly 89 million ? mobile Web users, as reported by Nielsen.

Financial services advertisers
Financial services advertisers are extremely diverse in their campaign targeting methods. They are reaching consumers with traditional mobile post-click actions such as place call, submit form and store locator/view map.

They also use deeper mobile engagement methods such as application download and watch video to achieve their campaign objectives.

Within the financial services vertical, 38 percent were banking advertisers, followed by car insurance, life insurance and home loan advertisers.

Engagement and targeting
A whopping 39 percent of campaigns on Millennial?s network drove to a custom landing page in November.

The company saw a number of retail brands create custom landing pages for holiday promotions to drive additional foot traffic in-store.

Further illustrating this activity, Millennial also saw the post-click campaign action, store locator/view map, increase 18 percent month over month.

Advertisers on the network used a broad array of campaign actions in November such as place call, join/subscribe, watch video, store locator/view map and retail promotion to drive their holiday campaigns.

Targeted audience campaigns leveraging geography, demographic, behavioral audience and audience takeover increased 3 percent month-over-month on the network, with 47 percent of advertisers? campaigns leveraging these methods.

The geotargeting method experienced the largest month-over-month growth of 9 percent and represented 39 percent of the campaign targeting mix in November.

Regional retail department stores with holiday promotions, entertainment brands with international movie releases and various tourism boards promoting last-minute holiday travel specials leveraged this highly-effective method last month.

?We saw a year-over-year seasonal trend around landing page use, which definitely spikes around the holiday season,? Ms. McKelvey said. ?In November, this jumped to the top mobile destination on our network, with over one-third of campaigns driving to a custom landing page. 

?We also saw numerous retail brand advertisers driving consumers to in-store locations in November,? she said.