Marketers hare having a hard time trying to master advertising over smartphones and tablets.
According to recent data published in a report from DialogTech Insights, mobile marketing is causing quite a bit of challenge for marketers that are hoping to be able to reach consumers over their favorite devices.
The issue is primarily stemming from a lack of metrics to show whether or not their efforts are working.
The data from the firm said that mobile search and landing pages are bringing about a combined 81 percent of all calls for their customers. Equally, another 18.7 percent have been driven by mobile display and social. That said, when call attribution has not been established, mobile marketing companies don’t catch 49 percent of the conversions over smartphones and tablets. This brings about an inaccurate understanding of their return on investment (ROI) figures, and it places the optimization of their campaigns at risk.
This is happening despite the fact that mobile marketing sources have grown by 34 percent in half a year.
Over the last complete year, there was a 77 percent increase recorded by the firm’s report. That report was based on an analysis of over 400,000 inbound calls that were placed to companies, and more than 60 million website sessions that had been tracked through the DialogTech platform called Voice360. That platform boasts more than 5,000 active customers spanning 35 different industries.
The data analysis in the report indicated that despite the fact that conversion rates are still significantly varied based on issues such as product and industry, the firm determined that there is an average 2.4 percent web form conversion rate on landing pages.
The DialogTech senior vice president of marketing, strategy, and analytics, Steve Griffiths, explained that “Call tracking is a form of lead attribution and marketing analytics technology marketers use it to track inbound phone calls back to the specific marketing source that originated them.” This means that call tracking makes it possible for mobile marketing companies to better understand their campaigns, ads, and keyword searches, as well as online and offline sources. A better understanding enhances the ability for optimization.
The COO of Midialets, Richy Glassberg, explained that the new channels are much harder than the old ones.
According to a respected veteran digital media executive, moving from the digital universe on a desktop computer into the mobile channels is causing mobile advertising professionals to have to work harder than they ever have before.
In fact, the exec said that producing successful ads for smartphone and tablets “is about 20 times harder.”
This, according to Richy Glassberg, the COO of the Media Rating Council approved mobile advertising company, Medialets. He explained that “In desktop, there’s 15 years of technology which allows anybody to build one ad in Flash, it works everywhere.” However, the environment has changed dramatically as smartphones and tablets have made their way into the mainstream.
Midialets served mobile advertising to an estimated 30,000 different devices in December, alone.
This statistic helps to illustrate some of the challenges that are being presented by the mobile marketing industry to firms that are attempting to serve them. The range of different devices, alone is something that has never been experienced in the desktop market. This requires marketers to attempt to make an ad work regardless of the environment.
Glassberg said that “The scary thing for the agency is, ‘Did my ad work?’” He also expressed that the rate of change that his firm has been witnessing is greater than anything else that the ad industry has ever seen. “I don’t think anybody’s caught up.”
The opinions shared by Glassberg were given during an interview that was held during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. This was the ideal forum for the type of discussion that Glassberg was having with his interviewer. The reason is that while media firms were being recognized for the astounding successes and achievements that they had made, it helped to underscore the challenges that they faced at the exact same time.
While previous efforts to advertise in the digital sphere had held a primary focus on the ad itself and not as much on whether or not it would actually function – because there was considerable experience in that area – mobile advertising has been forced to take that additional step in such a varied landscape lacking a universal standard format.
