Mobile ads four-to-five times more effective than online ads

Mobile advertising is four-to-five times more effective than online advertising on average, according to an InsightExpress presentation at a Microsoft workshop.

When measuring a marketer’s mobile efforts, there are two pieces that are the most critical: campaign effectives and making sure that the Web sites and landing pages are mobile-optimized. Focusing on campaign effectiveness, InsightExpress measures unaided awareness, aided awareness, ad awareness, message association, brand favorability and purchase intent, and mobile outperforms online across the board.

“Mobile versus online is not necessarily apples to apples, but it’s simply a basis of comparison, and we’ve found that mobile advertising is four-to-five times as effective as online,” said Joy Liuzzo, Washington-based senior director of mobile research at InsightExpress, said at the Microsoft mobile marketing workshop last week at the software giant's headquarters.

“That’s due to various factors, including lack of clutter in mobile, typically one ad per page, and the mobile pages themselves typically do not have a lot of stuff going on—they tend to be very clean," she said.

“Also, the proportion of the ad on a mobile screen is greater, so it gets more share of eyeballs. We found that folks doing activities on their smartphones are as positively engaged as when they are doing something on their computer, so it’s a perfect storm of why mobile advertising works so well right now.

Joy Liuzzo is senior director of marketing and mobile research at InsightExpress
“We've seen this increase in certain mobile ad campaigns, because they’re not just static banners anymore, they’re more engaging—engagement is the secret sauce of mobile.”

An InsightExpress study of a campaign from an automaker found that mobile increased feature awareness (the control group was 13 percent, those exposed to the ad were 23.7 percent and those who engaged with the ad were 44.9 percent) and purchase intent/consideration (control 14.1 percent, exposed 29 percent, engaged 34.7).

Hence, conversations are shifting.

While there are a lot of feature phones out there, a high percentage of people who are interacting with mobile marketing campaigns are smartphone users.

Looking at consumers ages 25-34, about 50 percent of them have smartphoens, so the reach is getting there.

Text messaging still has the most reach, because both smartphones and feature phones are SMS-enabled.

But when marketers look at the mobile Internet, applications, video and social networking, the large majority of traffic is coming from smartphone users, which is a different audience altogether.

Ms. Liuzzo said that mobile is not a one-trick pony and that everything works comparatively well across the board.

While applications are hot, mobile Web is the workhorse and mobile video is still nascent but already very impactful.

When marketers make the applications versus mobile Internet distinction, they should realize that consumers with smartphones use both. They cannot live by applications alone.

“When it comes down to consumers, they are flowing in between apps and the mobile Internet, not making a choice of one or the other,” Ms. Liuzzo said. “There are a couple of areas where the mobile Internet is leading the charge.”

For example, among merchants and retailers that have a mobile commerce presence, 50 percent have a mobile Internet site only, 12 percent have an application only and 39 percent have both a mobile Web site and an application.

Ms. Liuzzo offered another interesting insight: social pressure drives mobile adoption.

Consumers take note of what all or most of their family and friends are doing on mobile, and it tends to be monkey-see, monkey-do.

“The fact that we have so many folks doing these activities using their handsets, that will encourage more folks to do them as well, and it will keep going on and on and gathering momentum,” Ms. Liuzzo said.

For example, 82 percent of consumers have used their mobile phones in a store, 55 percent in a doctor’s office or hospital, 17 percent during a movie at the theater, 14 percent while flying on a plane and 7 percent during church service.

Around 17 percent of mobile users have shown a clerk in a store a picture of a product on their mobile phone, saying in effect “I want this please,” which is a new shopping behavior that is surprisingly being driven by men.

Thirty-four percent of men ages 25-34 and 29 percent of men ages 35-44 have done so.

Ms. Liuzzo calls men the forgotten shopper, and they overindex for mobile shopping behavior.

“When you start to look at who is driving the behaviors using their mobile devices in store, it is primarily men ages 25-34,” Ms. Liuzzo said. “Men are now showing these new behaviors—‘I’m in a store, and I’m going to use my mobile to find out what I need and get information.

“If their behaviors are out there, as a marketer or merchant you take advantage of them as much as possible.”