7 Important Mobile Advertising Basics To Follow

  • Post category:Mobile Advertising
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  • Post last modified:January 22, 2021

I say mobile advertising, you say unpredictable!

Yes, we understand your pain. Mobile marketing is ever changing and complex.

Many agencies and advertisers are just like you. They are hesitant too. But, it’s inevitable!

Eventually, advertisers must consider mobile advertising campaigns because people embrace mobile in their daily life, it is changing how we communicate, work and live.

We want to help you get ready to move in.

So, we did some research and talked to some experienced mobile advertisers. And, here’s a list of important basics you need to know before running a mobile advertising campaign.

#1 Lingo used in Mobile Advertising

If you’ve attempted mobile advertising, you are probably, by now, confused or overwhelmed. There’s DSP? SSP? RTB? Inventory? Publisher? Advertiser? ATD? Ad Network? And many more!

Most of you would probably already know as they are similarly used in desktop advertising. Before we go into the lingo, let’s talk about the typical advertising ecosystem. If you haven’t already know or need a refresher, here’s it.

Advertisers who have ad campaigns to run will need to buy ad space from publishers to advertise on mobile websites or apps. For example, as an advertiser your are charged to run a soft drink ad campaign. So you will probably want to target teenagers. Meaning mobile websites or apps that typically teenagers visit. You’ll look for publishers who own ad inventories on those websites and apps who want to gain revenues from selling those spaces to advertisers like you.

In the trading aspects of mobile advertising, both parties can benefit from such partnerships. However, back in the days, typically both advertisers and publishers deal directly and go through a lot of manual work to strike a deal. Even with the presence of Ad Networks, they still face a lot of hardships to achieve targeted advertising.

This is all changing right now. Everything is going digital with programmatic advertising.

Here are some of the key terms of programmatic advertising.

Demand Side Platform (DSP)

  • Allow advertisers to bid for the ad space using data to influence their buying
  • Also known as “buy side optimiser” or “buy-side platform”
  • A digital standard for centralized and aggregated media buying from multiple sources
  • Include real-time bidding capabilities of the sources

Real-time Bidding (RTB)

  • Method use in buying and selling ad inventory that happens “live” or real-time at a particular moment
  • A way for you to auction with data consideration, i.e. demographic and behavioral, in instantaneous manner

Ad exchange

  • Sales channel for buying and selling of online media advertising inventory
  • Prices are determined through bidding from multiple ad networks
  • A technology-driven way unlike historical manual price negotiation on media inventory

Ad Network

  • Organisations that provide outsourced sales capabilities for publishers
  • They sift through the inventories and audiences from various sources
  • Offer buying opportunities with buyable ad inventories for media buyers, i.e. advertisers
  • Provide enhanced values for both parties, i.e. unique targeting capabilities, creative generation, and optimisation

Supply Side Platform (SSP)

  • Allow publishers (exclusively) the chance to sell their ad inventories to advertisers with competitive prices
  • Also known as “sell-side optimiser”, “inventory aggregator”, and “yield optimiser”
  • Buyers of inventory managed by SSP are usually from DSPs or ad networks

Agency Trading Desk (ATD)

  • A department or subsidiary of advertising agencies that helps their clients to conduct all the ad inventory purchases

Now, putting them together, here’s a simple picture illustration to show how they’re connected.

Image of online display advertising ecosystem

Sources: IAB – The Evolution of Online Display Advertising | Glossary of Interactive Advertising Terms

What you can do

Find where you stand, who to talk to, and how you can place your value in this ecosystem.

#2 What Mobile Advertising Platforms and Ad formats available in the market

The next thing you need to pick up on is the potential of mobile advertising platforms and mobile ad formats. There are two types of mobile platforms where you can target your ads.

Mobile Web

Mobile websites are pages arranged to fit mobile viewing, which could be smartphones or tablets. You will see more mobile-friendly sites popping up when the Google Mobilegeddon fully rolls out. So now your ads can be seen on not just desktops, but mobile websites too. You can achieve further reach with more users move to mobile devices. Furthermore, with current trending rich media ad content, you will achieve better results by giving users better ad experience.

In-App

Apps are downloadable mobile applications or programs. In-App ads are visible within these apps, instead of appearing on the Internet space. In-app ads work on a different level of an ecosystem that gives users the best mobile browsing and interactive experience that mobile websites cannot give.

These platforms significantly influence the ad formats: size, shape, layout, typography, and arrangement of information given or sought in an ad.

What you can do

Discover where your gaps are in terms of technicalities or find the right people to work with.

Additional Resources:
Best Mobile Ad Formats & Sizes for Display Ad Campaigns
How to Create HTML5 Animated Ads
Create Rich Media Ads with MobileAds.com’s Ad Builder

#3 How the currency model works

There are several ways for payments or charges that take place in mobile ad campaigns. There are a few relates more to mobile while most of them are no stranger to you if you’ve run ad campaigns for a desktop.

PPC / CPC: Pay Per Click / Cost Per Click
Advertiser pays publisher when an ad is clicked.

CPI: Cost Per Impression
Advertiser pays publisher for an ad view.

CPI: Cost Per Install
Advertiser pays publisher when an application is installed.

CPA: Cost Per Action
Advertiser pays publisher when a specified action is completed.

CPV: Cost Per View
Typically used for pop-ups, pop-unders and interstitial ads. Advertiser pays publisher when an ad appears in a user’s browser.

CTR: Click-Through Rate
A way to measure the number of clicks on a specific link.

CPM: Cost Per Mille
Advertiser pays publisher for a thousand ad views.

CR: Conversion Rate
A way to measure how many percent of users take a desired action.

IR: Install Rate
A way to measure how many percent of users install an application.

More readings

Here’s what our partner, Tune has to say about decoding the mobile advertising acronyms.
And, here’s AdWords glossary from Google.

What you can do

Just add on a few more acronyms to your advertising monetisation vocab. Understand how they impact you and your clients and what to look for in your metrics.

#4 Know your consumer and audience

Knowing your consumer and audience is no feat to you, I suppose. It’s not something new in the advertising world. Just that, for mobile advertising, you’ll need to learn more about their mobile browsing behaviors, study ways that can capture mobile users’ attention and willingness to spend time on your ads.

As we all know, advertising can be scary for many where they find ways to avoid it. Same goes to mobile users.

So, it’s imperative to understand who you are targeting and who will most likely take your ads seriously.

Knowing this will help because with mobile programmatic there are many rich data (geo-targeting, behavioral targeting, etc.)  you can work with to target your ads to the right crowd effectively.

Here are a few reasons why people are ‘scared’ of ads.

  • They received ad offers that they have no interest in
  • They find it frustrating with endless badgering of things they are not interested in
  • They feel bad for continuously rejecting your offers, which gives them bad impression of your brand
  • They get disrupted by ads while doing something like playing games / reading interesting articles
  • They get benefits or features that are not attractive enough

Knowing these, it will help you to strategise your campaigns for better and fruitful results. Few key elemental points to keep in mind are

  1. Impress and attract your target audience
  2. Make them stay with your ads till the end with more interactions
  3. Help them make decisions
  4. Provide them with easy ways to get what you are offering

This makes it all the more important to engage your audience with effort and creativity.

What you can do

Understand your users and their mobile browsing behavior. Build customer personas so you will know how to deliver valuable and effective ads to them. Forget about just selling, start with solving your clients’ problems.

#5 Be relevant: Right person, right message and right moment

To make a customer happy, it’s very important to offer users what they need at the right moment. It’s even better when they can leverage on it immediately, such as an immediate discount. And above all else, offering helps like advice and guidance create customer loyalty.

Here’s a success story, check out Kiip’s huge success by mastering the art of displaying the right messages at the right time.

In a survey conducted by Advids.co, on being relevant

  1. More than 50% were happy to receive certain types of messages that are relevant
  2. 52% would take advantage of an immediate discount
  3. 46% want to receive a gift from companies

What you can do

Plan your advertising strategy with your audience in mind and have an end goal of building customer loyalty. Remember solve your clients’ problem over selling them what you think they need.

#6 Test, Measure, Optimise, Repeat

A successful mobile ad campaign requires a lot of work, but can be very fruitful.

Not testing your own ad campaigns can be a colossal mistake, especially if you’re already targeting the right person. But, not getting the results due to simply the wrong message at the wrong time. It’s truly important to experiment with various offers, designs, core messages and many more. And from there, decide which produces the best results.

You might also be surprised at times, that your most revolutionary and astounding ad can fall flat in the face of the wrong type of audience or right audience with wrong timing. This might give you a false impression that your ads aren’t that good.

Huge results can be achieved with just the smallest change in details. Keep testing and pivoting, then your KPIs will be much closer than you think.

We also need to accept that mobile advertising will never be the ultimate solution for all companies. So as advertisers, the question to ask is, “How can you make sure that your mobile ads are doing enough?“. By taking a more personal approach in your ads, great results will come due to the specific audience you’re trying to impact, and having tested your ads for countless times.

One of the baselines to get you started on your new campaign is Test, Measure, Optimise, Repeat. Here are the rest to give you the big picture:

  • Don’t overthink it
  • Understand leads to personalised experiences
  • Kickstart relationships by adding values
  • Test, measure, optimise, repeat

You can get the details here.

What you can do

Find out ways you can measure your campaigns, study the results and change accordingly. Always have various plans in your pocket that enable you to pivot fast.

#7 What is the standard conversion rate

In a recent study and a whitepaper by xAd based on research, suggested that a new standard should be considered. It’s called SAR, secondary actions rate, which refers those measuring actions such as calls, directions and more information. This seems to offer better indicators of mobile ad awareness, engagement or purchase intent.

Also, another impression currency we’ll be looking at is the Viewability Impression. According to MediaPost, the development of Viewable Impression standard is key interim step on the road to the goal of establishing an audience-based digital measurement currency that can facilitate an era of effective cross-platform measurement.

The image below represents the current conversion rates for today’s mobile ads in the US, and will give you an idea on their performances.

Image of mobile ad conversion

You can also conduct your own benchmark analysis of ad performances across different parts of the world here.

What you can do

Learn how these standards can help you in optimising your next ad campaigns.

Wrapping it up

Mobile advertising is an ever growing business, and with huge margins to boot.

But it takes a lot of experimentation and testing to really leverage on this industry. We hope these 7 pointers will help you get ready to include mobile advertising in your campaigns.

Here’s a summary of our sharing and your key takeaways.

  1. Learn the lingo used in Mobile Advertising: Find where you stand, who to talk to, and how you can place your value in this ecosystem.
  2. Understand what Mobile Platforms and Ad formats are available in the market: Discover where your gaps are in terms of technicalities or find the right people to work with.
  3. Learn how the currency model works: Just add on a few more acronyms to what you already know about advertising monetization. Understand how they impact you and your clients and what to look for in your metrics.
  4. Know your consumer and audience: Understand your users and their mobile browsing behavior. Build customer personas so you will know how to deliver valuable and effective ads to them. Forget about just selling, start with solving your clients’ problems.
  5. Be relevant: Right person, right message and right moment: Plan your advertising strategy with your audience in mind and have an end goal of building customer loyalty. Remember solve your clients’ problem over selling them what you think they need.
  6. Test, Measure, Optimise, Repeat: Find out ways you can measure your campaigns, study the results and change accordingly. Always have various plans in your pocket that enable you to pivot fast.
  7. What is the standard conversion rate: Learn how these standards can help you in optimising your next ad campaigns.

Over to you

Any thoughts? Come share with us your mobile advertising experience. Just leave us some comments below.

Additional Resources:
Best Mobile Ad Formats & Sizes for Display Ad Campaigns
How to Create HTML5 Animated Ads
Create Rich Media Ads with MobileAds.com’s Ad Builder

Alvin

Alvin is the Founder and CEO of MobileAds.com. He is a go-getter, and adventurous guy who believes in working smart to gain success in his business ventures and in life. He also founded RichMediaAds.com and MobileLanders.com.