Tag: tablet marketing

Mobile marketing continues to be a struggle for Google

| July 23, 2014

The company’s quarterly results have revealed that it has yet to master this advertising channel.

Although Google has proudly held its position as central and key to online advertising as a whole, when it comes to mobile marketing, specifically, it is becoming increasingly clear that the search engine is having a hard time spanning the gap to the smaller screen.

Although consumers may be using their smartphones and tablets on an increasing basis, advertising to them is difficult.

Mobile marketing is not simply a matter of the same traditional digital advertising, only on a smaller screen. Formats that were used over desktops are providing an entirely different experience for smartphone and tablet users, and it’s not one that they like. The screen size restrictions and touch screens mean that old ads simply don’t carry over to the new devices. That said, Google has not yet been able to figure out exactly how to make its ad business shine as it has done for the desktop and laptop channel.

This has meant that Google is less capable of charging the same type of premiums for its mobile marketing ads.

mobile marketing - GoogleWhile this has been suspected for some time now, the recent release of the company’s earnings has only underscored the struggles that the company is facing as a result of this problem. The cost per click (the amount that an advertiser pays every time an ad is clicked) fell by 6 percent in the quarter that closed in June, when compared to the same quarter in 2013. This has been blamed on the increasing shift toward mobile advertising.

The decline in the ad prices was only the latest in an overall two year trend in that direction for Google. That said, further analysis was not made possible based on the released data as Google does not provide a breakdown of ad revenue based on desktop versus mobile channels.

Google is not alone in its struggle to break through the mobile marketing challenge and come out shining. Nearly all of the major players have found that the transition to multichannel marketing that will appeal to various forms of device user has involved quite the bumpy road and that the various gadgets and screen sizes are presenting far different requirements than had been initially expected.

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”.