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Six Myths About Mobile Advertising

Six Myths About Mobile Advertising

A quick question: When was the last time you left home without your smartphone? When you were 12? Although each of us uses smartphones daily and, in many cases, cannot imagine any activities without it, some brands are still not convinced of the effectiveness of mobile advertising.

Today we are going to take a closer look at and destroy all six myths.

Myth 1: Low-quality inventory

Since more publishers adopt mobile as their main content strategy, we see a rapid expansion of high-quality inventory alongside bad inventory. Therefore, brands that use mobile ads as part of their strategy do not suffer from a lack of profitable inventory as long as they choose well. The inventory quality depends entirely on whether or not it is selected by a skilled programmatic professional or a transparent, established DSP.

Moreover, with the increasing adoption of remote work and education, people spend more and more time consuming different kinds of content on their mobile devices. The supply is booming when there is high growth in demand.

Of course, advertisers still need to make sure that their ads appear in a brand-safe environment. However, we will have a separate article about that.

Myth 2: With iOS 14.5 and higher, it's not possible to target users anymore

The recent iOS updates brought some additional changes in the data collection process for advertising purposes. Apple requests permission to track user activities in the App Store and Apple News. It also allows users to hide IP addresses and emails, providing randomly generated email addresses for lead gen forms.

With App Tracking Transparency, Apple did make sure that the data on their consumers is available mainly for Apple itself, significantly cutting other tech giants' targeting options and revenue stream.

This update was supposed to make the data collection process harder for AdTech companies. Especially for Facebook and Google, who are heavily reliant on 3rd party cookies. Pay attention to whether your DSP uses cookie-based or cookie-less tracking of devices to assess their long-term viability.

P.S.: Whether Apple cares about user data privacy or not is a different question. Most probably, they just want to put a higher price tag for collected data and use privacy as a weapon to hurt their advertising competitors.

Heat map mobile advertising

Myth 3: Limited KPI measurement possibilities

This myth we heard from one of the prospects (now a loyal client) that mobile does not offer holistic campaign assessment. That is not correct. Unlike desktop ads, mobile can analyze data beyond standard KPI metrics, down to measuring customer interaction with ad creative.

Mobile can show not only CPM, CPC, CPL, and CTR. It can also show a lot more detail about how mobile users interact with advertising:

  • where the ad was seen (location context)
  • when the ad was seen (time)
  • how long the interaction was (dwell time)
  • pre-click behavior (about 20-30x more data than just clicks)
  • gyroscopic movement (i.e., if people drawing the phone closer when the ad appeared)
  • where the interaction happened (whether it was an incentive or fat fingers click)
  • what side of multisided interactive creative is more popular
  • what message drives the most reaction, and
  • what banner people desperately try to close.

These are just a couple of examples to prove the point. Adello provides unique creative reporting for each campaign to unlock even more insights.

Myth 4: Small screens reduce viewability

This is actually a big advantage of mobile. Because of the smaller screen size compared to a desktop, it's impossible to ignore mobile advertising. While on desktop, an ad typically competes with 20 other concurrently shown ads on a 27″ screen, on mobile, it mostly is one ad alone.

Research proves that recall, brand perception, and purchase intention on mobile are up to 5x higher than on desktop. Moreover, since mobile is a very personal device, marketers can push more personal, intimate advertising. Which further increases the chances of positive interaction.

Myth 5: animated ads perform better than static

Theoretically, this may seem logical: Our attention is getting driven by animated objects. In reality, however, this is not always the case. Over the years, Adello has produced different kinds of ad creatives, including static, animated, and interactive ones. According to our research, static ad banners perform very similarly to animated ones. However, interactive banners perform significantly better than static and animated, as they invite users to interact (swipe, peel, reveal, etc.) and play (answer quiz, rank smile, play music) with the creatives. This can be seen on the heatmap, which shows the interaction and clicks pattern for ad creatives.

Myth 6: Mobile ads are annoying

Any ad can be annoying. Think about all those cheap spam ads popping up when you read your morning news. That is really annoying, right? The problem here lies not with mobile. The problem is the poor quality of ad creative and often random targeting. Such ads are not relevant.

Poor understanding of your audience and, therefore, sloppy targeting will bring your campaign ROI to minus. Successful ad campaigns should have relevant messaging and creativity and, ideally, be tied to human behavior.

Mobile is the best space to analyze consumer behavior in the online world. Call us today if you want to learn more or discuss how to make your ad campaign benefit from our 14 years of experience in driving results.

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