Category: Mobile Commerce

A recent survey has shown that apps play an important role in m-commerce decision making.

The results of a new survey that was conducted by Apptentive have shown that most shoppers will browse through at least one retail mobile app before they actually head out to a brick and mortar shop to purchase the item they have been considering.

The survey involved the participation of 350 people, and was held in July 2015 regarding shopping habits.

What the survey showed was that when consumers were considering making a purchase, many of them would turn to a mobile app, or several applications, to help them through the decision making portion of their purchasing experience. The data leaned heavily to the side of using mobile technology when retail shopping was involved.

The survey showed 88 percent of shoppers used a mobile app from one of their favorite retailers.

It also revealed that 61 percent of the participants said that they had used those mobile apps within the month prior to having participated in the survey. A smaller number of the respondents, 26 percent, said that they used their retail apps on a regular basis – that is, 7 or more times per month.

Overall, the mobile device users would look to their apps to help them to prepare to head out and go shopping. They would usually have finished using those applications ahead of actually arriving at the brick and mortar shop. Apptentive called the behavior “app-rooming”, as 71 percent would use the application as a kind of digital showroom, to look through the specifications of a product before actually heading over to look at the physical item that they wished to purchase. Those shoppers conducted this app-rooming behavior at least one time every month.

Once they actually reached the stores, they would still use the mobile app, but not quite as much. Just slightly more than half of the respondents to the survey had used retail apps while they were actually within the store itself. Still, over half is a highly significant proportion of the customers that make their way into a store on any given day.

The global earnings from smartphone based ads is increasing at a very rapid rate.

A recent report has indicated that the global revenue from mobile advertising, last year, increased by a tremendous 64.8 percent, which is a direct reflection of other trends relating to smartphones.

The region in which the fastest revenue growth was experienced was in North America, at 76.8 percent.

That said, mobile advertising appeared to experience a rapid growth rate worldwide. Other regions all experienced increases in revenues that were more than 50 percent. The form of mobile marketing that saw the highest rate of growth in terms of its revenues was mobile display ads. That category increased its revenues by 88.1 percent, year over year. It managed to surpass mobile search as the dominant category in the smartphone based advertising segment. This data was reported by the Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), as well as IAB Europe, and HIS Technology.

The report found that global mobile advertising revenues reached the $31.9 billion mark, last year.

That revenue represents an increase of 65 percent. Of that, North America made up 44.9 percent of the revenues.

When looking at the individual categories of mobile ads, mobile search lost its first place status to mobile display, which is now the biggest segment. Mobile display saw a growth rate of more than 88 percent.

According to the senior vice president of IAB, Anna Bager, who is also the general manager for the IAB Mobile Marketing Center and Digital Video Centers of Excellence, “Mobile devices are at the center of consumers’ lives across the globe and these numbers reflect brands’ increasing recognition that this medium holds great power. Now is the time for the industry to coalesce on standards and guidelines to build even more momentum for mobile marketing around the world.”

It is more than clear that mobile advertising is growing at an exceptional rate, as marketers, brands, and businesses alike begin to discover that the time in which this category can be considered a luxury or a novelty has passed. Mobile-geddon has shown that there is no way to continue to deny that advertising over smartphones and tablets has become a vital part of marketing.