How to get the most bang for your mobile advertising buck

June 6, 2008

Tony Nethercutt is vice president of sales at AdMob

By Tony Nethercutt

In my past columns I’ve discussed the ad units you can buy on the mobile Web and how to size your media buy. The next topic I am addressing involves creative for mobile.

You know you can run both text link ads and graphical banner ads. You may be wondering if there are any tips on how to get the best performance from these ads. Here are five best practices that we have learned from running thousands of campaigns and from listening to our advertisers.

Test multiple creatives for each campaign and track performance. Instead of taking a gamble by trying to predict which banner design or which ad text copy will catch the eye of your target market, I recommend that advertisers provide the site or mobile ad network they are working with multiple creatives at the outset of the campaign. 

This way, you can run small-scale tests to give you meaningful insights into which creative clicks best.

The average click rates for banners range from 1 percent to 2.5 percent depending on targeting (5 percent-plus is not unusual), and around 0.5 percent for performance text ads, so you’ll want to test and track performance for best results. 

By testing your creative, you know which ads to run based on real data. 

Most advertisers want to also measure post-click results back to the creative. That functionality exists in various forms today through home grown systems and other vendors.

Keep creative fresh. Once you’ve determined which creative performs best and you start running your campaign, you’ll want to work with your sales partners to change creative every two weeks throughout the flight of the campaign. This is particularly true if your campaign is ongoing for a few months or more. 

By changing images or just the word order of your text, you’re more likely to see continuous engagement with your ads, because users are more likely to click on relevant ads they’ve never seen before.

Most advertisers use a “champion versus challenger” approach to determine which creative to run.

Go easy on the text within the banner ad. Since banner ads run with a line of text below them, you can use the banner itself to catch your customers’ attention with images and your logo. Communicate your calls to action in the line of text that runs beneath the banner. 

Use trigger words in your ad text where appropriate. This recommendation may not surprise you, but if your product offering includes a free element – free download, free evaluation, et cetera – let users know by including the word “Free” in the text portion of the ad that runs below the image.

Likewise, we’ve seen evidence that users respond well to video offerings, so if you have video assets on your landing page, let users know.  “Watch Video” is a simple and effective call to action.  At AdMob, our device detection techniques allow us to only serve ads that mention videos to phones that are video-enabled.

Personalize your message. As you know, relevance enhances engagement. In mobile, one effective way to personalize an ad is to include the user’s device manufacturer or device model in the ad text.

Many ad networks can dynamically insert these details at the time of the ad request. All you have to do is ask your mobile ad network to enable the feature.

For example, a Land Rover text ad that runs on a Motorola Razr could say “View Land Rover photos on your Razr” instead of “View Land Rover photos on your phone.” Adding a detail like this will make any ad instantly more relevant.

Using these creative best practices to maximize click-through and conversion metrics will help you find new levels of success on the mobile Web. You can work with brand research companies such as Dynamic Logic and Insight Express to measure brand awareness and favorability metrics of your mobile campaigns.

Tony Nethercutt is vice president of sales at mobile ad network AdMob Inc., San Mateo, CA. Reach him at .