Recently InMobi sent an email to its publishers to help them improve the performance of their sites for ad monetisation:
Google Wireless Transcoder(GWT) is known to cache publisher pages and serves it to browsers with some common features like carrier, handset capabilities for some time. At this moment we don’t know how long this cache is hot and what is the criteria for caching data. But as a side effect of caching publisher pages, GWT also caches the InMobi ads stitched into it. This results in
Opportunity loss for publishers: publisher servers and hence InMobi don’t know about page impression and old ads keep rolling
Incorrect Targeting
InMobi’s research suggests that adding the following meta tags in a <HEAD> tag of site pages is effective in avoiding caching.
GoMo News has just published a magazine pulling together a collection of ‘thought-provoking essays from leaders in mobile innovation’, including a number of articles on mobile marketing. You can read it here.
Yahoo have found a way to take more cash off their advertisers hands whilst destroying consumer confidence and making it sound like a win-win for everyone. Boy are their clients going to be disappointed. What they’ve done is automatically started showing advertisers’ full web ads on iPhones and Androids. According to the recent Yahoo blog entry:
The coolest part is you don’t have to do anything to expand the reach of your ads. We’ve done it for you. As of today, your ads should begin appearing immediately on these devices for relevant searches, if they have not already.
With this tweak, standard Sponsored Search ads (40-character header, 70-character description, the host URL—you know the drill) will appear on these mobile devices, giving your ads wider appeal and more relevancy to people on the go.
Will it expand the reach of their ads? Yes. Will it give them wider appeal? Probably. Will they be more relevant? Of course not. Because the landing pages for these ads were built for the full web. Some will use flash. Some will have video or sound streaming. Some may offer PC/mac downloads. And all will be fullscreen sized and force the user to scroll around the page on their mobile screen to see what the offer or content is. Even on an iPhone, the impact of a full web landing page will be greatly reduced compared to the full web experience.
This means advertisers will be throwing away money as smartphone users click on promising ads only to be disappointed by an incomplete or unreadable landing page (if they can wait long enough … only a small proportion of smartphone users around the world have 3G data speeds). And Yahoo will massively increase ad exposures and click throughs thus generating lots of yummy extra revenue for nothing.
Advertisers need information and control. If they want to bring iPhone and Android users to a full web landing page, fine. But if they know what they’re doing they ought to create specific landing pages for these devices so their message can really be made relevant and impactful for their audience. Yahoo should give them the choice.
My advice to advertisers: Tell Yahoo to take your full web ads off smartphones and let you use their Yahoo Mobile Sponsored Search product for that instead like you always have.
Quattro Wireless have always been good at keeping in touch with their customers and doing what they can to deliver the most value to their clients in the mobile advertising space. Here’s testament to their success. 4 billion impressions a month is roughly 50 billion a year, almost half what AdMob has served since they launched 4 years ago. And Quattro also has a lot of iPhone, iPod Touch, PSP and Kindle traffic. Are they Admob’s closest competitor?
An interesting post today on Techcrunch suggests that we should kill the CPM to save the online advertising industry. As the argument goes, by using CPM as a prime measurement of campaign ROI advertisers and publishers are missing the real goals of relevance, engagement and conversions, and consumers suffer as a result.
I agree that CPM is not a good primary measurement of advertising success, even for brand awareness only campaigns. However do we really have to ‘kill it’ to make people stop using it that way? I argue that we shouldn’t, and certainly not on mobile. Here’s why:
CPM is still a viable and useful measure, if not the primary one. As a publisher selling ad space on your site, you want to maximise revenue for that space. Each page view needs to deliver great content and a great monetisation opportunity if that’s your business model. So you want to track if those extra pages of content you add are bringing in the money or not. As a ‘brand awareness’ advertiser where your goal is to create long term loyalty to your brand, CPM is a good measure to compare the cost of advertising across potential publishers you may choose for a given campaign …. assuming you also know how to factor in the relative quality of each publishers’ sites and the relative value of each publishers’ audiences.
Market dynamics will rectify the situation anyway. If you sell only on CPM, or you buy only on CPM, without looking at other measures of engagement and action, then you will lose out. Poor content sites with lots of ads will command lower and lower CPMs because advertisers value your disenchanted audience less. Poorly targeted, cheap CPM campaigns will cost you more in the long run as an advertiser because they won’t have the desired effect. Users will vote with their mouse/thumb and avoid sites with poor content and ad overload, and go to better quality sites where there are fewer, more relevant ads.
On mobile, the above applies, except even more. You cannot fill a mobile webpage with more than 2 or maybe 3 ads maximum (for a long page) without really annoying the visitor. Their perception of your site degrades in proportion to the volume of advertising you fill it up with. The quality of your mobile pages needs to be even more engaging because of longer download times and the small screen size.
It’s true that CPC and CPA are becoming more useful measures for ‘performance advertisers’ who want their ads to generate immediate action and response. But CPM still has its place as a useful measure, and should not be so easily dismissed.
In a previous post, I talked about how AdMob’s move to stop supporting ad mediation layers such as AdWhirl and TapJoy for ad serving was bad for competition in the mobile advertising market, and would push many iPhone developers into having to make a tough choice to stick with Admob or go elsewhere. Now AdMob has gone and acquired AdWhirl, thus changing the developer’s choice from ‘to AdMob or not to AdMob’ to ‘to trust AdMob or not to trust AdMob’.
Despite AdMob’s (sincere, I think) assurances of transparency and fairness, open sourced code and so on, it’s just human nature to be suspicious and look for conspiracy. How can AdMob assure everyone that they do not have a conflict of interest between becoming the biggest ad network in the world and offering a service that helps developers use other ad networks to monetise their apps instead? You can’t be an independent financial advisor if you’re incentivised to offer products from only one bank. How can AdMob be an independent mobile ad broker if it really wants you to use its own network?
AdMob knows that information is the new oil. That’s why they launched AdMob analytics, which already gives them plenty of information about their customers and also rival ad network performance, because advertisers can use it to track ad performance with other ad networks (although it can’t track pricing). But this is exactly the same reason why people will not trust their acquisition of AdWhirl.
What iPhone developers need now is a mediation layer mediation layer whereby the app can switch between mediation layers to serve the highest paying mediation layers’ ads
Alternatively, AdMob could ensure they offer such great eCPMs and revenue-share to developers via their own ad network that it becomes a no-brainer to use them, mediation layer or not.
Mojiva has just announced that they served their 4 billionth ad. Launched just over a year ago, Mojiva has seen rapid growth in the ad network space, hitting 1 billion ads served in February this year and 2 billion by the end of March. I consider Mojiva to be one of the most forward-thinking mobile ad networks, offering a range of additional services such as a white label platform, ad revenue optimisation, and allowing ads to be scheduled and tracked by the hour. The mobile ad market is growing rapidly and there are already over 20 mobile ad networks out there with new ones appearing all the time. Mojiva is well placed for a leading position in the race.
AdMob, the first and biggest mobile ad network in the world, announces that it has served over a 100 billion ads since its launch in late 2005. Here is a nice summary of their company history so far.
FirstPartner has released its mobile advertising forecast for Western Europe 2009-2013. It seems everyone is releasing forecasts and they are all big. Their contribution to the pile is that mobile advertising will be worth in excess of €950 million in Western Europe by 2013.
Some of the highlights include:
Mobile advertising will grow at a CAGR of 50% from 2009 to 2013, with the UK being the strongest market valued at over €200 million by 2013.
The most dominant revenue stream will continue to be mobile internet search, which will grow at a CAGR of 55% from 2009 to 2013
The key to the development of mobile advertising is that operators, agencies and sales houses begin to work more closely together to educate the market about the benefits of mobile advertising.
