Category: Mobile Commerce

Canadians still prefer cash, but they are slowly starting to pick up their smartphones to make purchases.

According to the latest report from Technology Strategies International, a research firm, there is a very slow but upward growth of contactless mobile payments in Canada, to the degree that it will one day replace the current leader, cash.

The most recent report said that over half of Canadian smartphone owners had used their device for a transaction.

The report was called Canadian Payments Forecast – 2013 and it stated that over half of the smartphone owners in Canada had made a purchase at some point in which they used mobile payments to complete the transaction. Most of those were in the form of remote transactions, such as paying a bill through their bank’s smartphone app, or purchasing a product over the internet.

The use of mobile payments while in stores remains quite low despite the fact that remote transactions are common.

According to the Technology Strategies International president, Christie Christelis, “The incidence of in-store payments using mobile phones is very low.” Christelis went on to explain that “But with the increasing penetration of contactless payment acceptance terminals, coupled with the proliferation of NFC (near field communications)-enabled phones, we expect that by 2017 there will be almost 3 million regular mobile payment users in Canada.”

The report indicated that the primary mobile payments growth drivers within the marketplace in Canada include higher personal spending on products and services, as well as deeper electronic payments penetration of digital transactions into areas in which checks and cash had previously dominated.

Christelis explained that over the last two years, there has been a 20 percent increase in awareness of contactless mobile payments options that are available to consumers, adding that the familiarity with contactless cards as a transaction option is growing among Canadians, and those are being used more often. In that way, contactless transactions have already been making steps toward displacing the use of cash. It is expected by the report that this will become much more significant through the use of smartphones as well as cards, for the next five years.

Fiksu research data has indicated that smartphone ads are outperforming those that are more familiar.

Fiksu has now released the findings of its most recent research which have indicated that the cost per engagement of mobile marketing is ten times less expensive than paid search marketing.

This study is only the most recent evidence of how advertising over this channel is succeeding.

In fact, it shows that mobile marketing has pulled ahead of traditional advertising techniques both in affordability and effectiveness. The report, “Brand building on mobile devices: measuring the value of consumer engagement,” involved an analysis of over 2.4 billion app marketing data points from global application brand campaigns that have been implementing promotions through the Fiksu Platform. What it revealed was that compared to traditional channels of advertising, these are considerably more cost effective.

Fiksu also released a new metric for measuring the ROI of mobile marketing of brands.

As an element of its study, Fiksu brought in a brand new type of metric that was created to allow companies and brands to better understand the return on investment (ROI) of mobile marketing (the cost per mobile engagement). According to Fiksu, the central findings from this research were the following:

• The mobile marketing CPM (cost per thousand impressions) rates are the second smallest among all of the various forms of advertising – including print, broadcast and digital. The only lower rate is through social media.

• When it comes to major brands, mobile display advertising CPCs (cost per clicks) are up to 90 percent less expensive than desktop pay per click (PPC) campaigns.

• In mobile app advertising, the CPEm (cost per engagement in mobile) for mobile marketing is a tenth of the cost of a keyword click over desktop.

According to the Fisku vice president, Craig Palli, “Brands are waking up to the fact that mobile apps provide an incredible and very cost-effective canvas for marketing. But using CPM and CPC as sole measures of ROI eclipses the powerful engagement that mobile apps bring and which brand marketers seek.” When discussing this mobile marketing study, he went on to say that “Fiksu’s new CPEm metric is a far more meaningful tool for brands to use for planning and decision-making.”