New report highlights the growth of mobile commerce across 13 countries

MEF, a global trade association focused on the mobile space, has release the first report in its Global Consumer Insights Series on Mobile Money. The report highlights the growing popularity of mobile payments across 13 countries. Mobile commerce has been making strong growth in many of the world’s most prominent markets. Much of this growth is being driven by the growing number of people that have smartphones and tablets and how much they are beginning to use these devices in their daily lives.

Report shows 15% of device users have made a mobile purchase in 2013

According to the report, some 15% of device users throughout 2013 made some form of mobile payment from their smartphones or tablets. The majority of these people made a purchase using some kind of mobile wallet application. These applications primarily leverage NFC technology, which allows digital information to be transmitted over short distances. Mobile wallets that do not make use of NFC technology are becoming more popular, however, as NFC-enabled mobile devices are still somewhat rare.

Mobile money users are becoming more important to businesses around the world

The report shows that mobile money users tend to spend more on individual purchases than others. The report notes that mobile money users are 10% less likely to make low-value payments and 14% more likely to make mid-value payments.  These particular consumers are becoming an important demographic for businesses that wish to engage the mobile audience, especially because these consumers are more likely to participate in mobile-centric initiatives, particularly those that leverage some kind of engagement technology, such as QR codes.

Mobile-only culture is beginning to emerge in developing countries

MEF’s report suggests that a “mobile-only” culture is beginning to emerge in developing countries. This involves people becoming more dependent on their mobile devices and making use of services that are only available through mobile platforms. Mobile banking, for instance, is becoming quite popular and a growing number of consumers are beginning to manage their finances solely through these mobile platforms. Mobile banking is expected to become much more popular than it already is as more financial institutions begin targeting mobile consumers.

Geolocation technology is rapidly increasing in its importance when it comes to sending ads to consumers.

Though location based marketing has been an area where marketers have been pecking away over the last couple of years, trend reports are starting to indicate that this use of geolocation technology is ready for the mainstream and that consumers are going to start seeing it a great deal more.

According to a recent report, the total spending on this ad tech will breach the $10.8 billion mark by 2017.

In three years from now, spending on location based marketing is expected to represent 52 percent of all of the money spent on mobile advertising. This, according to the data from a report predicting the future of the geolocation technology, issued by BIA/Kelsey. That same report suggested that in 2012, marketers were already spending $1.4 billion on these targeted campaigns.

Clearly, in this small span of time, location based marketing spending will head skyward.

Even more interesting is, perhaps, the discovery in that same report that attribution tracking post engagement has already arrived as a “a competitive imperative for mobile advertisers, publishers, networks and ad tech providers.” This, according to the BIA/Kelsey vice president of content, Mike Boland, when discussing the firm’s forecasts.

Boland went on to explain that the penetration of smartphones, in combination with the broad spectrum of different behavioral and location signals make it possible for improved attribution to occur. This, at the same time that it is being compelled by a greater demand from advertisers to tighten their ROI. He stated that “Tying conversions back to specific ad campaigns is the holy grail of advertising, which will make campaign attribution the mobile battleground of 2014.”

The predictions from BIA/Kelsey are considered to be highly optimistic, particularly when taking into consideration the current emerging nature of this form of advertising and, potentially, its methods of attribution.

As location based marketing over mobile channels is still quite new, it is not difficult to explain why only about 3 percent of current ad dollars are headed in that direction. However, if this report is accurate, then this trend will be changing very soon, and quite rapidly.