Mobile Advertising in Digital Marketing

In a world that is growing more dependent on smart phones every day, it is essential that we adjust our approach to digital marketing accordingly. Recent studies show that around 51% of the US population use mobile devices, while only about 42% still actively use desktops. There are now billions of users on mobile, whereas desktop users are measured in hundreds of millions.

Chasing Behavior

These days, for the first time in history, mobile usage surpassed desktop and marketers would be wise to capitalize on this global platform shift. You shouldn’t expect to see conversions if you fail to target users where they are—on their mobile devices. Companies allocating the majority of their advertising budgets towards desktop are likely losing revenue to their more progressive competitors.

Right now, analysts still see a significant discrepancy between mobile advertising expenditure and mobile usage. This gap is expected to decrease within the next few years. As advertisers alter spending behavior to mirror that of consumer behavior, mobile ad revenue will steadily increase over the next few years.  

The Mobile Platform

Given these trends in the mobile market, it has become essential for digital advertisers to tap into the key mobile platforms of search, social media, display, and video.

Mobile search and social media have historically driven the greatest percentage of US mobile ad revenue and should continue to do so in the next few years, with mobile display and video ad revenue lagging not too far behind at compound annual growth rates of 96% and 73% from 2013 to 2018. Noteworthy is the fact that programmatic ads still account for less than half of mobile display revenue due to the cookie-based targeting limitations on mobile devices. Within mobile browsers, JavaScript tags—and thus the advertisements they trigger—can be effectually blocked. However, mobile users spend the majority of their time “in-app,” where JavaScript doesn’t exist. Therefore, mobile ads tend to have better performance and reach when served in-app rather than on mobile browsers.

Popular Ad Platforms Are Going Mobile

Here are some popular digital advertising platforms that have recently turned much of their focus to mobile advertising:

• Google AdWords: Google AdWords runs a native mobile device app that, like other native apps, is completely immune to the marketer’s bane — ad blockers. In early 2016, Google began leveraging DoubleClick in a new wave of native web ads. In addition, Google has added another platform, AdMob, which features revenue-per-click advertising.

• Bing Advertising: According to Bing, mobile searches account for a third of all Bing Network queries. Likewise, nearly half of its ad clicks now come from smartphones.

• Facebook Ads: According to Statista, mobile advertising has accounted for more than 90 percent of Facebook’s revenue growth since 2012. Today, mobile generates 74 percent of Facebook’s annual revenues.

• Instagram Ads: Instagram runs a native mobile device app that’s completely unaffected by ad blockers. Plus, the Instagram community has now grown to more than 400 million users, making it a marketer’s prospective paradise.