Have You Moved to Mobile Ads Yet?

One of the challenges of any advertising campaign is getting your product in front of the right audience.

For years marketers were content to have their digital advertising campaigns placed on websites in the form of creative and stylized banners in order to ensure their brands were getting in front of people. High click-through rates were considered the gold standard of effective marketing, but this no longer is the case. The very basic advertising premise of getting in front of perceptive audiences remains; what has changed is the channel of how to get there. The bottom line: desktop advertising is dying and is being replaced with mobile ads.

It’s not difficult to understand why. Just consider the last time you clicked on a desktop ad yourself and then compare that with the last time you’ve seen a captivating image on Instagram or an effectively targeted Facebook ad that caught your attention. Chances are the ads that piqued your interest happened while you were on your phone and perhaps during a lull in the day, maybe at lunchtime, when you wanted to learn more about the product or service being advertised. This scenario plays out over and over again and does so with impressive success.

If you are still unsure about moving your ad campaigns away from desktop and onto mobile, consider the following:

• Mobile has higher click-through rates with a lower cost-per-click than Desktop.

In a recent case study from DMN3, a marketing firm, advertising data from one of their clients showed some compelling figures that make the case for mobile.  When comparing a recent ad campaign which had 93% of its placement on mobile, they discovered that mobile had a higher click-rate of close to 4% while desktops was just over 2%. The cost-per-click (CPC) rates make an even more compelling case. Mobile’s CPC was just over $.20 while desktops was nearly twice as much at close to $.50.

• Mobile resonates with people better than desktop does.

According to a recent IAB report, mobile ads drive higher brand life than desktop ads do. Mobile outperformed desktop in 4 key areas: awareness (1.6x better), favorability (2.1x better), likelihood to remember (2.3x better), and purchase intent (2.6x better). Though mobile advertising is performing better than desktop, it’s still only attracting 35% on online ad dollars. This clearly should serve as a catalyst to move away from desktop since it works well and is being underutilized by marketers.

• New developments will continue to improve mobile advertising.

Another encouraging sign for mobile advertising is that new developments will only make it better. For instance, Google has already released new expanded text ads in AdWords to provide more ad space that will allow marketers the ability to include more information about products before a user clicks on it. To put this into simple terms, you’ll no longer be able to create or edit standard text ads. Instead, you’ll only be able to create and edit text ads using the expanded text ads format. Existing standard text ads will continue to serve alongside expanded text ads though but even more importantly, these new text ad sizes will be optimized around the screen sizes of smartphones. Initial testing reported increases in click-through rates of up to 20% compared to current text ads. This development could be a game changer for mobile advertising.

If that doesn’t convince you, consider the fact that over 6.8 billion people currently use a mobile phone. To put that figure into context, that’s a whopping 87% of the world’s population. This helps make the case to choose mobile over desktop because as phone sales continue to grow, for many people owning a desktop computer may not make sense.

Advertising is continuously innovating but it does so out of necessity, and that means following the habits of users. Using mobile ads is a smart move for your business.