Category: Mobile Marketing

Mobile advertising at Facebook will soon include video

| July 25, 2014

These ads will be able to follow a viewer from one device to the next.

As Facebook continues to work on broadening its social media mobile advertising possibilities, the company has started to view the new sequential ad method as a technique with a great deal of potential for boosting the ability to control branding message among consumers using the network.

Sequential video ads give marketers the ability to send targeted video ads in front of a device user when a device is clicked.

Based on what is specifically clicked by the smartphone user, and what the mobile advertising message happens to be, marketers become able to follow up on previous selections with similar video ads as the user moves from one device (such as a smartphone) to another (such as a laptop or a tablet). By being able to create a sequence of various ads targeted specifically to the user, a more complete sales pitch can be formed from one video in the sequence to the next.

This series can work its way to a final mobile advertising “sell” video that is meant to encourage an actual purchase.

Mobile Adveritsing - Video AdsWhen it comes to mobile marketing, video is playing a very important role that many believe will only become larger – much larger. As unique profile IDs can be generated, it provides marketers with an improved ability to sequentially target its content for the various device users as they use their social media accounts. This way, each following video in the sequence can build on the ones before it, offering considerably more control over the way that the message is ultimately delivered.

This will also give Facebook the opportunity to provide advertisers with a higher level of control in the way that their product messages are deployed. The social network is bringing together a number of different elements from its own analytics as well as those of partners in order to improve their overall ad targeting capabilities.

Facebook is capable of obtaining massive amounts of user data that is helpful to mobile advertising, based on the info held within the accounts of the various user profiles, in addition to their actual activity.

Mobile commerce website “rules” may not be necessary for success

| July 25, 2014

Barnes & Noble’s smartphone friendly site does everything wrong but has managed to get it right.

Even though Barnes & Noble has done virtually everything wrong when it comes to the typically accepted guidelines for ensuring success in mobile commerce, the smartphone friendly site still seems to be bringing in a comfortably high success rate.

The m-commerce website has a heavy page weight, it loads slowly, and it contains far too many page elements.

The mobile commerce site for the number 41 company in the Internet Retailer Mobile 500 essentially breaks all of the rules when it comes to the recommendations that have been made by Keynote, a highly respected firm in this area. And yet, despite its failing to use the best practices for its overall page construction and for its performance, it is doing quite well. According to Keynote’s Matthew Agnoli, “The Barnes & Noble mobile home page is more than twice as slow as any of the other top five sites, as well as more than double the amount of content and is much larger in size.”

Still, the site still ranked as number 5 on the Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index.

Mobile Commerce - RulesThis was for the week that ended on July 13. According to Agnoli, the one strong point of the m-commerce site that raised it above many others was that it held to a tremendous success rate, which was 99.35 percent. For that week, the average success rate for all of the sites on the index had been 97.96 percent, so clearly Barnes & Noble’s website performed notably better.

That said, success rate enough may not be adequate for the site to be able to hold its position among the top 5 on the list. If other sites manage to bring their own success rates higher, then Barnes & Noble could find its rank plummeting rather quickly. Agnoli pointed out that “A site needs to be both reliable and fast to ensure high customer satisfaction and to keep customers returning.”

Agnoli recommended that the Barnes & Noble mobile commerce site make a number of changes in order to improve the site’s performance and speed it up, to make it much more appealing to consumers.