Advertising technology has evolved in the last few years, especially in programmatic. Mobile advertising is the buzzword of the day. 92% of all online activity is preformed from a mobile device. If you’re not running mobile specific ads, optimized for these devices with easy checkout and form fills, you have no idea what you’re missing. It is definitely one of the most effective means to reach out to your potential customers.

In our ever increasing online world, a brilliant advertising campaign needs to focus on its mobile phone using audience. Mobile advertising is an evolving new field that differs a lot from the traditional concepts of ad making. 

Modern marketers use a vast range of sophisticated copy-creative and targeting options to create user-friendly mobile ads to boost a brand name and generate higher revenues. 

Mobile Advertising and its Benefits

Mobile ads are the ad tech answer to a consumer world that is addicted to their smartphones. We’ll specifically go over banner advertisements and video advertising.

Considering the average screen size of mobiles, the advertisements are optimized to fit into a smaller display area. 

Mobile advertising is a part of mobile marketing using traditional techniques and strategies to collect data. This may include consumer profiles, demographics, habits, preferences, GeoFencing for proximity based advertising, etc., instead of going out and reaching your markets on the physical level (especially during the pandemic cir. 2019-202?) Mobile advertising makes use of the popularity of smartphone devices. 

The increase of mobile advertising has been revolutionary when it comes to marketing campaigns. Benefits include an increase customer engagement rates, cost-effectiveness, hyper-targeted and thus, personalized offers for better consumer relationships, and social media friendliness. 

2021 Mobile Advertising Trends

Seeing an online promotional advertisement pop up while you’re using an online app is a common occurrence. Consumers expect these and their responses to the advertisements are growing in numbers.

In the last year, advertising purchased through a DSP or programmatic advertising platforms increased from $84 billing in 2019 to $98 billion in 2020.

Mobile Advertising Basics – Things to Know

So what are the basics that you need to know before you step into the amazing, yet ever-changing world of mobile advertising?

Here’s a list of some basics that you need to learn:

1. The terminologies used:

Programmatic advertising is the new trend in the world of advertising. Everything is changing to digital. Following are some key terms being used:

Demand Side Platform (DSP): It is also known as “buy-side optimizer” or “buy-side platform”. DSP is a digital standard that works for centralized and aggregated media buying from multiple sources. This also includes real-time bidding capabilities of all sources. 

Real-Time Bidding (RTB): This method is specifically used for buying and selling ad inventories that are present in real-time (live). 

Ad exchange: These are the sales channels for purchasing and selling online media advertising inventories. This is the modern version of the traditional manual price negotiation techniques used for bidding. 

Ad network: This refers to the organizations that outsource sales services for publishers. Their key tasks include sifting through the ad inventories from various sources and generate buying opportunities for advertisers. 

Supply Side Platform (SSP): These are exchange places for publishers who want to sell their ad inventory to advertisers. They are also commonly referred to as “sell-side optimizer”, inventory aggregator” or “yield optimizer”. 

Agency Trading Desk (ATD): As the name suggests, this refers to a department of the advertising agency that facilitates the ad inventory purchases by the clients. 

1. The mobile platforms used:

Understanding the mobile platforms that can be used to target your ads is a crucial aspect. Following are the two types of mobile platforms being used:

Mobile Web: This refers to the pages that are arranged to fit the mobile screen sizes (both smartphones and tablets). Since more users prefer to access their mobile devices rather than desktops, it is easier to reach a higher number of target audience. Modern ad contents like video ads and other rich media versions help in offering enhanced ad experience. 

In- App: In today’s world, a discussion on mobile advertising is impossible without mobile apps. App advertising is one of the most sought after strategies used by marketers to promote their products. All you need to do is to pick the right apps and put up the right creative within it.

Apps are easy to download and navigate and are highly preferred by present-day mobile users. In-App advertisements are those that are visible within these apps. These are specifically designed to target user behavior and preferences and to give them the best browsing experience. 

Ad formats (as discussed in the subsequent sections) rely on the platform being chosen. 

1. The currency terminology being used: 

Mobile ad campaign payments can be made using several different ways. These include:

• Pay Per Click(PPC)- Also known as Cost per Click (CPC) in some countries. In simple terms, payments are made based on the number of times the ad is clicked. 
• Cost per Impression (CPI)-Payments are made for every new ad view.
• Cost per Action (CPA)- Payments are made for every completed action. 
• Cost per View (CPV)- Payments are made every time an advertisement pop up. 
• Click-Through Rate (CTR)- refers to the number of clicks on a particular link. 
• Cost per Mile (CPM)- Payments for every thousand ad views.
• Conversion Rate (CR)- Percentage of users taking the desired action
• Install Rate (IR)- Percentage of users installing an app. 

Advantages of Mobile Advertising

What makes mobile advertising so effective?

Markets are constantly expanding. New business ventures and entrepreneurs are looking for options to leverage this amazing opportunity.  Following are some of the key benefits of mobile advertising:

1. Accessible: Social media platforms and mobile apps have become the modern terminology for communication. People spend a considerable amount of time updating their apps. It is hence important to deliver your campaign directly to your consumers.And what better way to do so than to reach out to your consumers on their cell phones. The accessibility benefits of mobile advertising ensure that that your ad campaigns get delivered instantly and accessed easily by the users.

1. Geo-targeting: Since people keep their cell phones with them when they travel, marketers and advertisers can make use of the knowledge to deliver location-based, geo-targeted advertisements. Location-based mobile advertising is a great way to analyze consumer preferences and habits like shopping favorites, areas frequented, etc.     For example, when a shopper visiting X locality gets an advertisement of a sale happening in a store there, the chances of visiting the store are likely to increase. 
2. Understanding consumer habits: Mobile devices have a unique ID. Using the id’s, offline as well as online habits of the target consumers can easily be studied. This, in turn, helps in devising a sound marketing campaign. 
3. Cost efficiency: Mobile advertising is one of the most cost-efficient ways to reach your target customers.  In fact, the overall cost of designing a mobile advertising campaign is a small fraction of a TV or radio ad. Being budget-friendly means that marketers can afford to increase the frequency of sending messages or even target new customers repeatedly.
4. Personalized advertising: Mobile advertisements have the unique advantage of tailoring the mobile user’s preference in marketing campaigns. If your creative is of females in a yoga class, your audience should be females interested in yoga. It’s only logic.
5. Plethora of creative options: Since mobile advertising integrates well with social media channels, websites, and apps, it is possible to enhance the creativity levels of the advertisements. With a strong visual appeal and instant outreach, mobile ads ensure a stronger impression on the target audience.
6. Fraud resistance: Compared to desktop advertising, fraud detection is easy with mobile devices. It is easy to verify the “Click to calls” and usage. 
7. Instant results: Cell phone users keep their devices with them wherever they go. The chances of seeing an ad on a mobile set are more as compared to desktop or other traditional advertising methods. Additionally, it is also easy to track user responses instantly. 
8. Higher conversion rates: Smartphone-based ads, clicks, spend and conversions report the highest growth rate when compared to desktops or even tablets. 
9. Interactive: People like to take part in advertisements that come along with contests, games, etc. The use of gamification and other features makes mobile advertising more interactive. 

Mobile Advertising vs Mobile Marketing

While mobile advertising is synonymous to mobile marketing, they are different in terms of applications. Mobile marketing is an umbrella term that includes mobile advertising. 

Mobile marketing makes use of multiple services and data information like location based services, buyer persona and their habits, user preferences, etc. 

Therefore, certain mobile ads will appear only when a user enters a certain geo marked boundary. 

Mobile ad placement on the other hand works through programmatic bidding where marketers/advertisers are involved in real time bidding to place an ad on a mobile device. This includes processes known as demand side platforms (DSP) which enables advertisers to measure their performance. Performance optimization is done using KPI (Key performance indicators) like CPC, CPM, etc.

Types of Mobile Advertising at Traffic Roots

Mobile ads can have different forms and platforms. While marketers use each of the below-mentioned mobile advertising solutions, the suitability to a sector and the baseline strategy decides the choice. Various social media platforms work differently when it comes to mobile advertising techniques and efforts. 

What follows is to consider the different types of mobile advertising options available and consider them with respect to the goal of the advertisement. 

Following is a list of the most commonly used mobile advertising formats. 

1. Banner advertising

Banner ads are the oldest version of mobile ads. The origin of banner advertising can be traced back to web marketing. However, in a world that is more in love with interactive rich media ads, banner advertisements still manage to survive and be popular. 

Banner ads are often seen embedded in a web host page or an app. In most instances, these are depicted by images (or graphics with text) that are designed to grab the attention of consumers. The idea is to pull the customers from the host page to the advertiser’s page and later convert it into a paying client. 

The use of vibrant colors, quality graphics, and “Call to Action” tabs make banner ads very appealing and popular. The better the visual appeal, the higher is the customer reaction. 

While banner ads are very cost-efficient and are still being widely used, the world is quickly moving to other modern options like gamification ads and video ads (described below). 

That said, banner ads are very much alive and in demand. 

2. Video advertising

A report from the Business Insider says that social video advertising spend doubled up in 2017 (expectedly) to over $4 billion. 

Those FIGURES alone say a lot!

Video advertising is a very powerful communication tool to get a company it’s desired conversion figures. 

Product videos are extremely helpful for customers when they are in a decision-making process. Videos can effectively deliver a complete visual experience, which helps the users to get a closer feel of the products in question

A big percentage of consumers watch videos on their mobile phones. In fact, watching video on a phone has more impact and gets more conversions as compared to watching video ads on TV!

Ad makers and marketers use various techniques to display video ads on a mobile device. Options like optimizing a YouTube ad, Shopping ads that get displayed underneath the main video, sponsored advertisements that come at the beginning of video content are used.

3. Contextual App Mobile Ads

It is simple logic: if you are advertising a casino, your best contextual app placement would be games like poker, slot machines or blackjack. Contextual ad placement using the Traffic Roots white lists bring instant eyes to customers who are highly motivated to learn about your brand.

Some important tips for creating mobile video advertisements that generate good ROI are:

• Keep it SIMPLE
• Use your CREATIVITY
• Keep it short and CRISP
• The audio and visuals are NOT TOO LOUD
• Display a CALL TO ACTION

Key Steps for Developing a Mobile Advertising Campaign

An online mobile marketing campaign uses a certain set of key elements. Following is a list of factors that add up to create a successful mobile advertising campaign.

1. Establish Objectives

Like any other marketing campaign, it is important to define objectives for the mobile advertising campaign as a first step.  Defining objectives or measurable goals helps you understand your results and take valuable lessons from them. 

A mobile advertising campaign is created in the first place to raise awareness about the brand and increase sales numbers. It also helps drive the web traffic to the company’s landing page. A good number of companies create specific mobile advertisements to promote a special deal or a newly launched product. 

Irrespective of the objective, getting clarity on the goals helps in defining the metrics that are required to achieve the targets. 

Some examples of objectives for a mobile advertising campaign could be:

• Raise brand awareness
• Generate “x” number of registrations
• Get “x” number of mobile opt-ins
• Get web traffic to the landing site
• Getting “x” number of people for video gameplay 
• Increase sales to “x” figure
• Add a targeted number of new clients per month
• Advertise a promotional offer

2. Choosing Your Target Audience

Adding more contacts or clients is one of the key reasons to start a mobile promotion event in the first place. But just adding up the audience is not enough. You want to target a specific group of audience to be on top of your advertising game, like in our contextual app ad placement. It all starts with identifying who you want to target. 

Once the target audience is identified, it is important to study their preferences and other details like what they need, what they prefer, how they react, etc. We like to suggest reviewing your Google Ads behavior flow from A/B testing. For example, what is the bounce rate between the females aged 25-34 vs. 35-44 group? Where do they most often go on the website when clicking through? Soon, the data starts telling you more about your audience, from what information they need most before taking your call to action or making a purchase.

Studying a target group of potential consumers like our females above also helps to understand their mobile environments. 

It is crucial to factor the viewing mindset of users. 

They typically have smaller screen sizes than conventional desktops, and hence need better clarity with the texts, visuals, and graphics. Also, remember that mobile users usually have shorter attention spans. The advertisements should hence be sufficiently catchy to grab their attention. 

Various data segments in Google Analytics can be used to gather target audience profiles. 

3. Identifying the Type of Mobile ad You Need

Determining the type of ad campaign that is best suited for your product or services needs careful considerations. Ad campaigns could be created to simply generate higher sales or with the sole purpose of creating brand awareness. 

As mentioned in the earlier sections of the article, various types of mobile advertising formats are used by marketers. A campaign could be more suited to video ads or could work well with photo advertisements or banner ads. 

If you’re looking at generating a higher number of clicks, a regular banner advertisement can be used. When the target is to get high sales figures, creating video ads with a CTA link to the product works well. Ensure that the CTA link directs consumers to the landing page that talks about your product. 

While it is true that some mobile advertising formats utilize lesser resources than others, it is important to consider the purpose and the target audience when choosing a type. Video ads, for example, are costly to create but deliver higher lead generation and stronger brand awareness. 

Don’t be afraid to experiment with organic looking video ads. Here at Traffic Roots, we found consumers highly engaged with product review ads over 200% more than professionally shot videos in a CBD beauty advertising campaign. If you think on the logic of the consumer, it makes sense. Beauty products are so often reviewed on popular channels like Instagram and YouTube that consumers have become accustomed to seeing peers speaking of a product. It was a perfect fit for our client and brought tremendous success to the brand.

4. Decide the ad Campaign Length

Figuring out the type of mobile ad campaign that you want to run and the numbers that you’re looking to generate is the first step. Once you’ve done that, it boils down to planning the actual campaign. 

Start with planning out the length of your ad campaign. This again depends on factors like:

• Types of actions that the users will need to take (single click, multiple steps, etc)
• User group preferences as observed from previously generated data. 
• Budget availability

If a single click directs your user straight to the landing page for purchase, your mobile ad length will obviously be short. On the other hand, a campaign that targets both brand awareness and sales generation will need to run through multiple steps and will hence be lengthy. 

The length of the mobile ad campaign is also a factor that contributes to the overall cost, resources and time. 

5. Consider the Targeted Devices

Ad content varies based on the devices that are targeted. Different types of contents are used for different devices. 

Smartphones usually have small screen sizes and need more focused content with minimal interruptions. Tablets and iPads, on the other hand, require high-quality creatives. 

Understanding the device preference of your target customers is hence important. We actually keep coming back to the realization that understanding your user groups is extremely crucial. 

Even within a device, the time spent by a user on apps or mobile web needs to be considered. Preferences differ based on region and country. 

6. Ad Designing

It finally comes down to designing the mobile advertisement, complete with graphics and content. 

General guidelines to keep in mind while creating a mobile ad are available all over the internet. However, it is important to remember that mobile advertisements are created with the primary objective of getting the viewer’s attention. 

Focus on using high-quality graphics, especially when the ads are being created for iPad and tablets. Remember that viewers using a slightly larger screen expect better quality visuals than those who view the ads on their cell phones. 

It pays to spend time and resources on high-quality graphics when considering certain ad types like banner ads and interstitial ads. When it comes to mobile advertisements, content works like nothing else. Design alone may not do the job. 

Make sure that your content copy is compelling enough to persuade consumers to buy your products. Ad content needs to be crisp and clear about the product/service along with an attention-grabbing call to action tabs. 

If you can keep your content engaging and interactive, even better. 

Ensure that the number of touchpoints is kept minimal. A user may not like the idea of devoting too much time and attention to complete the CTA after seeing the ad. Keeping them away from their mobile work for too long can create negative reviews. 

Finally, as mentioned earlier in the article, keep your focus limited to a targeted set of audience. Let your users get a sense that the mobile advertisement understands their needs and is created for them. User data like demographics, location, behavior pattern, shopping choices, social media preferences can help creating user-targeted ads. 

7. Data management, reporting, and analysis

Gathering user information is easy. However, it is crucial to respect the privacy of your users and consider the safety of their data. Managing the data that is collected during mobile promotions is important. 

The database collected during mobile campaigns is huge. It is much more than what you can capture through online desktop promotions. Consider the following points for effective data management:

• What is the type of user data available with you?
• Owner information (it is advisable that you take ownership of the data from your technology provider)
• How will the mobile audience be segmented?
• How are the tracking links set up?

Reporting and analysis are again an important aspect of a mobile advertising campaign. it includes scrutinizing the following:

• User funnels and the goals that you want your consumers to follow
• User behavioral patterns
• User’s engagement time
• User visit frequency
• Campaign’s overall contribution to the overall objective

8. A/B Ad Testing

So your ad is prepared and you’re ready to launch? 

Now is the time to test the conversion rates. Measurements and metrics can be collected for a small period, like a month to see how the mobile ad is performing. An assessment at this stage will tell you how the advertisement is performing in terms of conversions and sales. 

Other testing variables include user flow, responses, load testing, data captured, etc. 

Mobile campaigns are usually tracked using two key attribution methodologies:

• Unique Identified matching
• Device Fingerprinting

Once you have some preliminary measurements, you can take time to improve your mobile ad. 

Key Mobile Ad Strategies That Work

A successful mobile advertising strategy varies from one business to the other. However, considering the general trends, the following are some key mobile ad strategies that have shown great results for various brands.

1. Use Modern Versions of Mobile Ads

Mobile banner ads are the conventionally used ones by various global brands. While they still hold their popularity, it is time to think beyond banners. Your brand isn’t dull and lifeless, and neither should your creatives be.

Consumers have shorter attention spans and limited availability of time to view the ad content being thrown in their devices. Think video and don’t sweat the small stuff.

While display advertisements like banner ads can be highly effective when directed to the right consumer groups at the right time, it is definitely time to include modern versions like video ads in your mobile ads spend. 

2. Think Local

The share of local ad spend is projected to jump in the year 2021. Ever wondered the reason behind the rapid growth?

Mobile ads are one of the best channels for businesses that are localized. With the possibilities of geotargeting, mobile ads are now being delivered to local consumers. 

In some ways, it helps the user feel interested and connected to the advertisement. When a brand decides to create local mobile advertisements (both, platform-agnostic and device-specific), the results are often highly effective. 

3. Audience Targeting

It is important to target your mobile ads to improve overall effectiveness. 

As an ad creator or a mobile ad marketer, it is important to remember that modern-day consumers have a low tolerance for ads that do not serve value. Make use of the capabilities of current mobile devices (like GPS) to create more targeting options. 

Targeting options like consumer demographics, time targeting, behavior targeting etc are very effective when you’re focused on improving your response rates. Ensure that you use as many of these targeting options available. 

Modern options like micro-location targeting and micro time targeting are also being used by mobile advertisers to generate better and rapid results. 

4. Reduce Your ad Loading Time

Even while fetching awesome conversions, mobile ads often end up being overlooked by user groups. In fact, certain studies report that a big percentage of mobile users prefer to block their mobile ads due to interruptions caused by the long loading time. 

We’ve all faced it. Slow-loading ads that take forever to come through. 

Not just are these ads blocked by user groups, they often end up creating a negative brand experience. 

Ensure that you build lightweight ads to keep them user-friendly. If possible, do not include heavy images or hosted video content. Ad serving processes like “polite load” help by loading a lighter file while the main content gets uploaded. 

Finally, try not to use incompatible technologies for ad serving. For example, don’t run an Android App download offer to iPhones.

Like we said, it’s just logic, so, keep it simple. Now, do it and do it well. We’re always here to help.