As much as the smartphone marketing sector is taking off, one study is showing it may be more noise than action.
S4M, a mobile ads firm, has just released the findings of a recent study that it conducted based on an analysis of smartphone advertising campaigns, which has shown that nearly half of all of the ad clicks are not actually reaching the planned destination.
The research involved an analysis of over 1 billion ad impression from American, European and Asian campaigns.
These were all mobile ad campaigns that ran during May 2014. What S4M determined was that among the clicks that were achieved, as few as 50 percent actually managed to reach their intended destination during that month. The news was slightly better when it came to tablets, as the clicks that were made over those devices failed to reach their destinations 35 percent of the time. That said, as high as that figure might sound, it was considerably better than was achieved over smartphones.
This lack of proper performance by mobile ads is understandably far lower than acceptable for most marketers.
The S4M CEO and founder, Christophe Collet, stated that this research reveals that “there is room for significant improvement in the deeper understanding of where the best campaign value lies.” The company also came up with three primary reasons that they believe that this poor performance is occurring in advertisements over these devices.
The first was in being able to create ads on a very limited screen size, which can lead to “fat finger syndrome”, in which the user merely clicks the ad in error, when the intention was to touch something else on the screen. The second was slow network speeds, which can lead to a dramatic increase in abandonment. And finally, automated bot clicks in fraud scams that will register that the click actually occurred, but not the actual arrival of a visitor.
Collet pointed out that when it comes to mobile ads, “Spending budget on clicks that never arrive is budget wasted.” He explained that each point in the journey of the consumer must be measured and analyzed in order to generate a much clearer picture of the performance of a given campaign, in order to “enable real optimization”.
In a recent interview with a business publication, Greg Coleman, the president of Criteo, said “Do mobile ads suck? Maybe, maybe not.” He added that if you are able to encourage a viewer to click an ad, which he called, making an “ad dance”, then you can assume “that it doesn’t suck.”