As advertisers seek to substantiate mobile budgets, one question many will be asking is what matters more – click-throughs to a mobile website/conversions or the amount of time the consumer spends engaging with the brand? It’s not that simple of course and ideally advertisers should aspire to maximise both. It is essential to evaluate both to measure mobile ROI accurately, therefore it’s advisable to hold supply partners (publishers and ad networks) accountable, and to optimise your mobile ad strategy to drive real business results—not just clicks.
Beyond the mobile click
Consider the typical approach to mobile display optimisation: From a media perspective, the marketing team evaluates data from a third-party ad server like DoubleClick or Atlas to see how many clicks and conversions are being generated by their ad placements. This helps media planners to identify supply partners who have been successful in increasing the quantity of visitors. However, click-through rate (CTR) alone does not provide insight into audience quality. Are visitors clicking deep into the advertiser’s mobile site and taking the time to engage with its content, or simply bouncing back to the original site never to return? The marketer has no way of knowing and no way to hold supply partners accountable for the guarantee of a qualified, targeted audience.
Meanwhile, in another part of the organisation, an IT team uses site analytics data such as page views, time spent, and navigational paths from companies like Omniture and Google to optimise the performance and visitor experience on the mobile site.
Imagine if the marketer could combine these two, often disparate, sets of information into a single, holistic view. Instead of blindly optimising for CTR or sheer quantity of conversions, an advertiser could optimise for a qualified audience, the type of visitors who engage most deeply with content and identify the supply partners that can deliver them. The advertiser could also compute the cost per average second spent on-site, critical for on-the-go consumers, to guide mobile media optimisation at the publisher, placement, and creative concept levels. These insights are especially valuable for brands that don’t have a direct sale-on-site such as cars, consumer packaged goods (CPG), financial services and pharmaceuticals.
The case for multi-layered analysis
To place the value of post campaign analysis into context, Velti’s experience with one major advertiser illustrates the benefits of a multi-layered view of mobile ad performance. Prior to the campaign launch, tools were implemented to anonymously track all campaign impressions and clicks delivered by the advertiser’s supply partners, and all site activity from the resulting visitors. By linking these disparate sets of information, it was possible to gain a holistic view of supply partner performance based not only on CTR but also on specific conversion goals and site analytic metrics such as page views, bounce rate, and time spent on-site.
The analysis of the click-through and conversion data showed significant differences in audience quality across various supply partners and some of these results were enlightening. The audience driven to the mobile site from inventory belonging to one supply partner, often considered a market leader for generating a high CTR, was spending little if any time on-site. Other supply partners that had previously been overlooked, due to either a relatively smaller total conversion count or lower CTR, were actually delivering visitors who spent nine times as much time on the site, consumed four times as much content and all for a much lower cost.
There could be several reasons for this disconnect: While the first supply partner’s inventory generated a high click-through rate from popular games or more generalist apps, it is less likely to be relevant to the user and this would account for the high bounce rates. By contrast, rich content providers and portals such as Yahoo or MSN are better suited to driving visitors to the advertiser’s site who are actively searching for particular information, photos, videos, locations, or reviews. Another consideration is that one supply partner’s inventory may be better suited to targeting a specific demographic and driving qualified leads in particular markets, this means different brands need to identify what partner is right for them.
What steps can advertisers take to increase mobile ROI?
There are several steps an advertiser can take to ensure they are achieving the best ROI on mobile:
- Ensure the publishers’ targeting capabilities align with your vertical and unique brand identity. Request information on publishers’ targeting methodologies and supply sources for proprietary audience segments and make sure they match your target audience and brand identity.
- Negotiate a better media rate according to the relevance of audience. In mobile, the dominance of a small number of supply partners can limit your ability to negotiate, but this shouldn’t stop you from challenging the status quo.
- Push your supply partner to be more transparent about the inventory where your ads are running. Even when a buy is blind, supply partners should educate you on the content surrounding or application displaying your brand’s ads.
For most mobile marketers, what really matters is engagement, not just total conversions. By creating a multi-layered mobile optimisation strategy based on both conversions and mobile site analytics, it is possible to combine both sets of data in a unified environment. This provides the insight you need to evaluate ROI, negotiate more effectively with supply partners and prove that your mobile ad spend is delivering a significant impact for your brand.
