Integrate mobile advertising in your online campaigns

From various reports in 2009, we could see that the growth in mobile advertising increased rapidly last year and was projected to make up 11.4% of the total digital advertising market by 2014 – analysis by  Berg Insight, a renowned telecom research company. This was further proven to be the direction to go when the world’s biggest search-engine company Google, bought Admob, a provider of mobile display ad technologies for $750 million in Nov last year.

Diving deeper into Admob, we see why is there a potential for advertisers to put in mobile inventories as part of their campaigns.

Take for example their mobile metrics derived in Dec 09 with data based on “the ad requests they received from their ad network of more than 15,000 mobile Web sites and iPhone and Android applications.” Breakdown of mobile metrics from Admob included trends for mobile manufacturers share and types of operating systems used worldwide. With a mixture of absolute figures and trends for the usage for smartphones reported regionally, advertisers can determine the growth of mobile web together with smartphone development capabilities that will change the consumers’ usage pattern.

Although mobile advertising is measurable with mobile analytics that gives you insights on your mobile campaigns so as to optimize their performances, there are also concerns arising from marketers about the fragmented nature of mobile networks currently where tracking of performance data can be quite a hassle across different mobile ad networks. One of the solutions suggested here is to have a creation of a universal API to improve the efficiency for the mobile ecosystem.

In addition, mobile advertising, unlike internet advertising, is described by experts as “a fragmented & complex space” with “no accurate data to conclude which is the biggest ad network”. Mobile ad networks that are available are said to be very different from one another and have to be dissected by advertisers based on target market and requirements.

For those advertisers or publishers keen to integrate mobile advertising as part of their marketing mix, check out a comprehensive guide from mobiThinking on mobile advertising which provides factors you should consider for choosing an ad network.

We see that the mobility in internet access has changed the web experience for users as a whole and extended the reach from advertisers to the consumers on a different level. It could be the time to explore this platform for business to integrate it as part of the marketing mix and potentially increase return on investment for your marketing campaigns.