Mobile Advertising The Driving Forces for Change

The driving forces of change in mobile advertising

 

by:Cheryl Morris is the director of marketing for Nanigans.

In less than a year, Facebook became the market leader in mobile display ads – outpacing giants like Google and Apple to control approximately a quarter of all mobile display revenues. What represented zero percent of Facebook’s ad revenues a year ago is on track to be a billion-dollar market this year in the United States alone.
Facebook broadly launched its first mobile ad product just weeks after its IPO. Fast-forward three months and mobile represented 14 percent of their business. It seemed every other week the company released a new mobile ad product, and by the end of 2012, mobile grew to represent 23 percent of Facebook’s ad business. And today this number has grown to 30 percent.
Why exactly have mobile ad dollars moved so quickly to Facebook? The answer is simple. Facebook and its Preferred Marketing Developer ecosystem are solving real challenges on behalf of marketers – challenges that center on the three core pillars of any successful ad campaign:

• Targeting
• Creative
• Optimization

Combined, these driving forces of innovation have resulted in advertisers achieving 15 to 20 times higher clickthrough rates (CTRs) on Facebook mobile as compared to desktop and, most important, are revealing the true return on investment of mobile ad investments.

Targeting

Twenty-five percent of time spent in mobile apps is on Facebook, with the social network bringing a 750 million person audience to mobile. While this engagement and scale is impressive enough, what’s more compelling to marketers is that (finally) hundreds of millions of people on mobile have an identity. From demographics and psychographics to affinities and behaviors, marketers have a trove of targeting data and combinations to leverage with Facebook mobile.
One Facebook targeting innovation achieving broad, sustained success starts with a marketer’s known customer-relationship management (CRM) data. With custom audience targeting, advertisers can upload information from their CRM database such as e-mail and phone numbers, and Facebook will match this data with profiles containing the same information. The targetable audience created through this process has proven a lucrative strategy for marketers from retail to gaming, with results like increasing the ROI of campaigns by a factor of five and driving 100 percent same-day ROI multiple days in a row.
Mobile ad targeting lacked identity almost completely prior to Facebook — with targeting data either nonpersonal or inferred. Take gender targeting. When mobile ad networks tell marketers they’re targeting women, what they really mean is they’re delivering impressions on publisher sites and apps that cater to women audiences. Sure, the marketer’s message could reach women — but there’s a high probability it’s also reaching men. Ultimately this lack of identity resulted in an industry relying on spray and pray tactics, with marketers buying blindly and thinking opportunistically that those people they’re putting impressions in front of will actual convert into customers.

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