Mobile advertising is a form of digital advertising that targets users via mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. This type of advertising aims to reach consumers wherever they are, capitalizing on the immediacy and personal nature of mobile usage.
Mobile advertising can appear in various formats, including display ads, video ads, native ads, and in-app promotions, among others. These ads can be served through a variety of platforms and networks, including social media channels, mobile websites, and mobile applications.
There are a lot of parties involved in the context of mobile advertising such as advertisers, publishers, ad networks, and of course, consumers. Through the technologies like ad servers, real-time bidding platforms, and tracking solutions, whole processes is streamlined.
Below is a simplified explanation of how mobile advertising works:
4. Bidding and Auction
7. Tracking and Analytics
Additional Mechanisms:
Frequency Capping
Ad Personalization
As a result of this process, mobile advertising maximizes engagement and achieves the desired results for businesses.
Mobile advertising comes in various forms, each with its own set of advantages and use-cases. Here are some of the most common types of mobile ads:
Banner Ads: These small rectangle ads appear on mobile websites or apps at the top or bottom.
Interstitial Ads: These are full-screen ads that cover the entire screen of a mobile app or website, often appearing during transitions like loading a new page or completing a game level.
Pre-roll: These video ads play before the main content starts.
Mid-roll: These ads appear in the middle of the video content.
Post-roll: These play after the main content has concluded.
In-Feed: This type of ads generally appear within the natural flow of content, for example, in a feed format as on social media.
Content Recommendation: These appear at the end of articles and suggest other related articles or products.
Sponsored Content: Aarticles or videos that appear beside other content but are labeled as "sponsored."
Rewarded Video: Type of ads that give in-app rewards for watching them.
Playable Ads: Interactive ads where users can use a mini-version the app, or play the game.
Carousel Ads: Ads with multiple images or videos.
Story Ads: Full-screen vertical videos or images appearing between stories
Promoted Posts: Regular posts with paid promotion to reach more people.
SMS Ads: Text messages sent with a promotional content.
MMS Ads: Promotional multimedia messages that may include video, audio, and images.
Ads apperaing in search engine results, usually at the top or bottom of the page, marked as "Ad" or "Sponsored."
Ads that are served according to users’ location, often through GPS tracking.
A type of interactive ads allowing users to try multimedia experiences like games, interactive videos, or clickable elements.
Short audio clips playing during streaming sessions on mobile devices.
The best practices, benefits, and drawbacks of each type of mobile ad are unique. The type of advertising chosen by advertisers depends on their marketing goals, target audience, and budget.
Mobile advertising offers several benefits that make it an appealing channel for marketers and advertisers. Here are some of the key advantages:
Globally, mobile advertising allows brands to reach a wide audience.
Advanced targeting options allow advertisers to reach specific demographics, geographies, and even individual behaviors, making campaigns more effective.
Mobile ads often offer a better ROI compared to traditional advertising channels. Plus, the ability to set budgets and bid for ad space allows for greater cost control.
Mobile ads can prompt quick actions from users, such as clicks, calls, or app downloads, thanks to the "always-on" nature of mobile devices.
Mobile devices provide a wealth of data that can be used to personalize ads, increasing their effectiveness.
From simple text ads to rich media, mobile advertising supports a wide range of formats, offering creative flexibility.
Geo-targeting capabilities make it possible to serve ads based on a user's location, which is particularly useful for local businesses.
Mobile advertising platforms provide advertisers with performance data that can be used to adjust campaigns quickly.
Users can seamlessly integrate mobile ads with other marketing channels like social media, email, and websites.
As Brands can stay relevant and competitive by investing in mobile advertising.
Formats like native ads and rewarded video ads offer a less intrusive advertising experience, thus improving user engagement.
Ads on mobile, especially those on social media, can be easily shared, increasing their reach and impact.
By using these benefits, businesses can improve their ROI and build stronger relationships with their customers by creating more efficient and targeted advertising campaigns.
Although there are several benefits of mobile advertising, there are also some set of challenges to be considered. Here are some of them:
People tend to use ad blockers, and that may result in fewer ads being shown to fewer people.
Sometimes poorly designed ads hinders the user experience of the whole mobile experience.
With the smaller sizes, amount of information available is very limited with the ads.
Using personal data on some ads raises the problem of privacy concerns.
There are a ton of different devices and operating systems, so experience is not unified among different devices.
Ad fraud is an important challenge faced by advertisers, as not all ad creatives are served to actual humans but to bots.
The attribution of downloads and conversions is difficult.
Constanly seeing the same ad creates an ad fatigue, which will end up with poor performance campaigns.
With the more advertisers, competition for screen time is fierce and costs are rising.
Sometimes broken links, long wait times etc can cause poor ad performance
Mobile users often engage in "snackable" moments, which can make it difficult to capture and hold their attention.
Due to a lack of standardized metrics and tools, measuring mobile advertising ROI can be challenging.
By Advertisers can better prepare for the complexities of mobile advertising by understanding and addressing these challenges.
Businesses can tailor mobile advertising strategies depending on their goals, target audiences, and industries. Most mobile advertising efforts, however, can benefit from some key strategies:
Decide your campaign objective before it starts, with clear goals such as brand awarenes, lead generation, app downloads, or sales conversion, you will be self guided.
Research your target audience, their needs, and how they interact with mobile devices.
Based on your campaign objectives and target audience, choose the most appropriate mobile ads (e.g., banner, video, native).
Mobile-friendly ads and landing pages ensure a seamless and engaging user experience.
To serve your ads to the most relevant audience segments, use geo-targeting, demographic targeting, and behavioral targeting.
Engage your audience with rich media such as interactive videos or gamified elements.
Optimize ad creatives, calls-to-action, and targeting options based on performance metrics by running A/B tests.
Utilize retargeting strategies to re-engage users who have previously interacted with your brand but did not convert.
Make adjustments to your campaign based on real-time analytics to ensure optimal performance.
If Enhanced relevance and effectiveness can be achieved by localizing your ad content to cater to different languages and cultural nuances, do that.
To measure your campaign's ROI, track conversion rates, cost-per-acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), and other relevant metrics.
For a cohesive marketing strategy, integrate mobile advertising with other marketing channels such as social media, email, and search engine optimization.
Comply with privacy regulations like GDPR or CCPA, as applicable, regarding data collection practices.
Try to use run time-sensitive campaigns based on holidays, seasons, or special events.
The purpose of mobile advertising platforms is to facilitate the exchange of mobile advertising inventory between advertisers and publishers who are looking to run campaigns on mobile devices. These platforms offer a range of features like targeting options, analytics, and different ad formats to make mobile advertising easier and more effective.
Here are some popular mobile advertising platforms:
One of the most popular advertisement platforms. They offer different ad types including search, display, and video ads.
Facebook ads allows advertisers to use Facebook’s extensive user base for exact targeting and different native creative types like Stories.
As they are owned by Facebook, they are using almost same user base but user base mostly consist of young people.
Although Twitter’s road for ads is somewhat bumpy, there a lot of ways to promote content with different creative types.
With its young user base, Snapchat offers story ads and vertical video ads.
The most famous short vertical video platform with a younger user base
Brands in fashion, food, and home decor can use Pinterest for its promoted pins capabilities.
Offers Sponsored Content, InMail, and Display Ads, making it ideal for B2B marketing.
This is specifically designed for in-app advertising, offering banner, interstitial, and rewarded video formats.
Targets users who are actively searching for apps by placing ads in the Apple App Store.
Providing mobile game advertising services, including rewarded video and interstitials.
The platform offers a variety of formats and high customization levels for mobile games.
A mobile publisher monetization platform with multiple ad formats and real-time bidding.
Allows contextual ads to be displayed based on what users are currently engaging with.
Has a global reach while focusing on user experience and mobile-first platforms.
These platforms are each suited to different types of campaigns and objectives, due to their different features, targeting options, and pricing models.
Group of experts from Storyly's team who writes about their proficiency.
