The need to improve the effectiveness of mobile ads may come as a surprise to come. The first challenge to adapt internet advertising to mobile use was to create effective ads in a much smaller screen area. Once this was done, both providers and users felt that mobile ad format was optimized. If pressed, many might award themselves an A. However, the marketers consulted by eMarketer are not as impressed. They rated the current state of mobile ad effectiveness a B-minus. However, it was not all stone-throwing on the part of the critics. They provided a solution to go with the problem: mobile analytics.

How Marketers Evaluate Mobile Ad Effectiveness

The marketers’ goal was to gain insight and give recommendations in each of the following areas:

• How do clickthrough rates for mobile display ads change over time?
• What can the market expect for future provider costs?
• What is the specific effectiveness metrics associated with mobile display advertising?
• What is working well now? What need attention to increase effectiveness?

A Results Snapshot

eMarketer expects a steep growth in advertising dollars spent in the United States this year: 82.3%. In spite of this growth, experts remind the readers that this spending will continue to lag the amount of investment spending on the mobile devices themselves. For this reason, the increase in expenditure may not necessarily imply a similar increase in mobile display cost per 1000 units (aka cost per mille or CPM.) It will continue to be a buyers’ market, which will keep the CPM metric, relatively stable.

Using eCPM as an indicator of campaign effectiveness, agencies will be pressed to tailor their creative assets. In other words, rather than simply modify personal computer-type advertisements, they will need to leverage mobile device features. In addition, they will be expected to take the way consumers use their mobile devices into account.

Specific Analytics

A detailed strategy requires a granular identification of weak areas in mobile marketing campaigns. Some of the associated metrics and their ratings include:

Doing Well (A-)

• Mobile location-targeted ads

Reasonable Performance (B+)

• Facebook mobile add formats
• Mobile video ad formats
• Mobile sponsorships
• Mobile reward-based ads

Sufficient Performance (B)

• Twitter mobile ad formats
• Tablet ads
• Mobile ROI
• Mobile rich media a formats
• Mobile ad targeting

Needs improvement (B-)

• Mobile interstitial ads
• Mobile ad buying process

Needs significant improvement (C+)

• Mobile result reporting process

Needs immediate attention (C)

• Mobile static banner formats
• Mobile measurement and analytics

Greatest area for improvement (C-)

• Mobile creative capabilities

Prioritizing this list in reverse order, perhaps starting with mobile creative capabilities is an excellent starting point for an effectiveness improvement program.

Better Analytics Lead to an Improved ROI

As providers and marketers take advantage of better analytics, they are in a better position to understand the barriers to effectiveness in their current campaigns. By using superior measurement solutions, they are able to quantify the levels of present performance, and use the costs of an improvement program to determine an overall return on investment (ROI) and lifetime value.

Developing Tools

Interested ad providers can find advanced tools right now. By working with tool providers and their representatives, mobile advertisers can realize improvements in a timely fashion. In the future, these tools will likely become standardized, and powerful analytics will be available as off-the-shelf solutions.