Tag: mobile advertisments

Mobile ads are seeing considerable tracking problems

| August 25, 2014

Online marketing on smartphones and tablets are facing serious issues with dirty data.

There are large problems developing in the use of mobile ads, in which marketers are regularly paying for impressions but where fraud is becoming increasingly commonplace when recording the data associated with the performance of a given advertisement.

There is little that mobile marketers can do to actually confirm that their ads are actually viewed by humans.

While there may be quite a bit of efficiency to the online advertising industry, it is also greatly flawed, and these issues are magnified when it comes to the growing number of channels that are being introduced through mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. For this reason, the mobile ads industry is starting to take aim at the fraud problem from which it has been suffering and which is getting worse.

Industry organizations are now starting to set mobile ads standards and transparency is being demanded by media buyers.

Mobile Ads - Tracking IssuesSome mobile publishers have begun a trend of creating user location data that have estimates that they will then be capable of transmitting to advertisers. From the side of the publisher, when a user’s specific location cannot be determined, then it could be possible to turn the registration form’s zip code or country code into a broader data guess for which marketers will pay a considerable price.

Unfortunately, reports have been indicating that over half of all of the information that has been providing this user location data is not correct. The Dstillery chief executive, Tom Phillips, as well as an early online ad fraud whistleblower have stated that at the moment the fraudulent data that is being produced by the industry for mobile ads is posing a threat that is just as great to marketers as fake traffic is on the standard web.

Phillips explained this problem with mobile ads by saying that “The data quality problem in mobile advertising is probably as serious [as traffic fraud problem on desktop].” He also added that “A lot of that location data we find is useless. It’s a big number — somewhere in the 30% range. If a third of the information you’re getting is not useful, than as you blend that together into a location strategy, you have a lot of noise. That’s problematic.”

Mobile ads may not be all they’re cracked up to be

| July 16, 2014

As much as the smartphone marketing sector is taking off, one study is showing it may be more noise than action.

S4M, a mobile ads firm, has just released the findings of a recent study that it conducted based on an analysis of smartphone advertising campaigns, which has shown that nearly half of all of the ad clicks are not actually reaching the planned destination.

The research involved an analysis of over 1 billion ad impression from American, European and Asian campaigns.

These were all mobile ad campaigns that ran during May 2014. What S4M determined was that among the clicks that were achieved, as few as 50 percent actually managed to reach their intended destination during that month. The news was slightly better when it came to tablets, as the clicks that were made over those devices failed to reach their destinations 35 percent of the time. That said, as high as that figure might sound, it was considerably better than was achieved over smartphones.

This lack of proper performance by mobile ads is understandably far lower than acceptable for most marketers.

mobile ads - lack of actionThe S4M CEO and founder, Christophe Collet, stated that this research reveals that “there is room for significant improvement in the deeper understanding of where the best campaign value lies.” The company also came up with three primary reasons that they believe that this poor performance is occurring in advertisements over these devices.

The first was in being able to create ads on a very limited screen size, which can lead to “fat finger syndrome”, in which the user merely clicks the ad in error, when the intention was to touch something else on the screen. The second was slow network speeds, which can lead to a dramatic increase in abandonment. And finally, automated bot clicks in fraud scams that will register that the click actually occurred, but not the actual arrival of a visitor.

Collet pointed out that when it comes to mobile ads, “Spending budget on clicks that never arrive is budget wasted.” He explained that each point in the journey of the consumer must be measured and analyzed in order to generate a much clearer picture of the performance of a given campaign, in order to “enable real optimization”.