Category: Mobile Marketing

Half of all smartphone shoppers in the U.K. are disappointed with the overall experience.

When it comes to mobile marketing and the smartphone commerce experience that is currently being offered, companies are finding themselves in a jam, as consumers appear to expect the usability of websites to be the equivalent of what they know from the standard web.

Unfortunately, these are two different technologies and the capabilities of smartphones aren’t there yet.

As businesses tinker with their mobile optimized websites, they are often either limiting them by too much of an extreme, or are weighing down each page too heavily with various objects, making it impossible to use for consumers who simply aren’t willing to wait the length of time that it takes to load. According to Eptica, a multi-channel consumer engagement firm, this is making mobile marketing and experience creation an extremely challenging process.

Companies are failing to meet the expectations of consumers in their mobile marketing and commerce.

More than ever before, consumers are receiving mobile marketing and are shopping over their smartphones but the latest survey from Eptica is showing that the majority of them don’t like the experience that they’re receiving. Feedback was received from 1,000 adults in the United Kingdom by way of this research, and what it determined was that 52 percent of those individuals felt that more than half of the websites that they visited using a smartphone or tablet had not been properly optimized for their preferred device.

The mobile marketing data was released in the 2013Mobile Customer Experience Study from Eptica. It also looked into the foundation issues that related to the unpleasant experience that consumers have said that they are having. The primary struggle was related to a lack of functionality both on the mobile web, as well as within apps that were designed for their devices (36 percent). Nearly as many people (34 percent) said that they were frustrated with the long loading times. Another 34 percent said that they disliked the websites that were not optimized to be viewed on the smaller screen of the smartphone or tablet gadgets.

Spending on ads targeting smartphone and tablet users almost doubled last year but still represents a sliver of the total.

Last year in Canada, mobile marketing spending on ads increased at an explosive rate, nearly doubling what it had been the year before, and yet it is still considered to be only a tiny fraction of the overall digital ad marketplace.

That said, if the growth continues at this rate, it won’t take long for this channel to carve a much larger slice.

This mobile marketing data is according to a report that was released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada. The report indicated that the smartphone ad revenue in 2012 came to $160 million. This was an increase of 97 percent over what it was in 2011. At the same time, revenues from online ads increased by 13 percent, bringing them to $2.9 billion. That still managed to beat the forecasts that had been established by IAB Canada.

This year, both online and mobile marketing ad revenues are expected to rise, but more moderately.

The digital ad revenues for 2013 are predicted to increase by 9 percent by the close of the year, reaching a total of $3.36 billion. This includes the 50 percent rise that is expected for ads over mobile marketing, which will come to an anticipated $240 million. These forecasts were created based on the advertising budgets that survey respondents provided to IAB Canada. These respondents included ad networks and exchanges, on top of online publishers. Those budgets reflected the first half of the year’s data.

The dollar figures have revealed that while mobile marketing does still have a great deal of potential as a channel over which to advertise, marketers are still only in the earliest stages of figuring out how they will be using the channel to reach their customers over these widespread and yet still quite new devices.

This also reflects a challenge that publishers face in being able to sell adequate advertising over smartphones and tablets in order to be able to recoup sizeable investments into the creation and establishment of their mobile marketing campaigns and smartphone based presence.