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Mobile marketing revenues in the U.S. break new records

| April 16, 2014

Local ads are now bringing in more money than they ever have before, and are continuing their rapid increase.

According to a new report that has been released by BIA/Kelsey, the mobile marketing sector’s local advertising revenues in the United States will be reaching $4.5 billion by the end of this year.

This will represent a massive increase over the $2.9 billion that was brought in during 2013.

These details have been published in the mobile marketing local ad revenues report from the firm, which also predicted that these figures will more than triple by the year 2018. At that point, the report predicts that the revenues will have risen to $15.7 billion. This helps to illustrate the importance of local when it comes to advertising online.

The report also showed that mobile marketing spending in the U.S. will rise to $11.4 billion, this year.

That will then continue to grow over the next five years until it reaches $30.3 billion. By the end of the forecast period of this report, mobile ads that are locally targeted will come to represent more than half (52 percent) of all of the mobile ad spending in the United States.Mobile Marketing Revenue

Propelling this localized share of the revenues forward over this channel is the rapid adoption of various tactics to appeal to smartphone users when they are within specific locations or seeking local businesses. These include such options as click to call, click to map, and geo-fencing. These are rapidly becoming more commonplace among national advertisers, who currently make up the majority of ad spending over this channel in the U.S. They are also those that are making the greatest effort to take advantage of the growing availability and yet currently greatly undervalued local advertising category.

Many smaller advertisers have yet to understand that the demand in searches is increasingly headed in a mobile direction as individuals bring their smartphones wherever they go and use them for a growing number of purposes. Therefore, this ad inventory is undervalued, providing an ideal opportunity to step into that mobile marketing space while it is the least expensive and most rewarding to do so.

Mobile apps are increasing in use

| April 14, 2014

At the same time, surfing the web over smartphones has started to decline.

Recent news about the use of mobile apps from Furry, an analytics provider, has shown that the usage of native applications over smartphones is continuing to rise, but it is doing so at the expense of the use of the web.

The data from the company showed users spend an average of 2 hours and 42 minutes on their devices each day.

This usage, which was accurate as of March 2014, represents a notable growth, as the same figure a year beforehand had been 2 hours and 38 minutes. Of that time, the usage of mobile apps represents 2 hours and 19 minutes. Equally, the amount of time spent surfing the mobile web has dropped in the United States, from having been 20 percent of the time spent on those devices in 2013 to only 14 percent, this year. This means that only 22 minutes per day are being spent on surfing.

This could suggest that the influence and attraction of mobile apps is growing among consumers.

Mobile apps increasing in useAccording to Simon Khalaf, the CEO of Flurry, these changes suggest that the mobile browser is only one of a large number of other applications on a mobile device. He explained that a browser on a smartphone is “a single application swimming in a sea of apps.” The data that Flurry gathered in order to make this conclusion was from its network that represents more than 450,000 smartphone applications. Those apps are installed on more than 1.3 billion devices located around the globe.

At the same time, it used comScore for the data regarding the use of apps and browsers, and it used NetMarketShare in order to determine the distribution of the usage of mobile browsers. This means that as interesting as the claims from Flurry may be, it is combining data from several sources which each have their own methodologies. While this does not indicate that the data is necessarily inaccurate, there is no way to verify the accuracy of what it suggests, either.

The report also looked into the types of mobile apps that were the most popular and determined that gaming is still the category with the greatest usage, representing 32 percent of the time spent on smartphones. Facebook was in second place at 17 percent.