64 per cent of American adults use smartphones, of which 7 per cent do not have access to traditional broadband services. Similarly in the U.K., studies project that 55 per cent of Britons will own a smartphone(and 51 per cent a tablet) by the end of 2015. These numbers are set to rise by 2018 to 68 per cent and 65 per cent respectively.
Obviously, mobile usage is on the rise and has been for a while. In fact, many digital publishers are now reporting that a majority of their readers are arriving at their properties through mobile, rather than desktop. With this readership move to mobile, advertisers have also increased their mobile ad spend to reach audiences where they are. According to eMarketer, mobile ad spend in the US will surpass desktop spending in 2015, by netting 51.9 per cent of the total digital ad spend. This number is predicted to rise to 70 per cent of total digital ad spend by 2019.
Despite this rise in mobile traffic and ad dollars though, revenue from mobile has accounted for a disproportionately small percentage of a publisher’s overall returns. As a result, they’re often left “chasing the mobile pennies that replaced digital dimes,” leading to subpar content aimed at maximizing pageviews.
There are a few digital publishers that are succeeding at the mobile game however — here’s how:
Mobile Optimized Site
With 40 per cent of users abandoning a page if takes more than 3 seconds to load, it’s essential to make sure that your website is as easily accessible as possible. This will make your advertising real estate alongside that content more valuable, since increased attention time, recirculation, and readership will drive up the ad impressions. Google also penalizes non mobile-optimized sites, something we’ve written about before. Yet many publications do not offer a mobile-optimized page. Clunky ads, bloated tracking software, interstitials and pinch- and-zoom reading make for a difficult mobile viewing experience.
ESPN has addressed this issue of bloated pages with a unique mobile redesign, which prevents ads from loading on pages until they are viewable on screen. This is useful not only to the audience (who benefit from faster loading times), but also to advertisers who don’t have to pay for unviewable ads. Likewise, New York Magazine has built an optimized mobile experience by utilizing platform capabilities such as scroll and swipe, which benefit ad presentation as well.
Mobile-friendly Formats
In addition to creating a mobile optimized web page, you also need mobile-optimized ad formats and designs. Traditional banner ads continue having less than impressive click-through rates on both mobile as well as desktop. Similarly, simply resizing or moving ads from desktop to mobile doesn’t work because the result is grainy, difficult to view and low quality ads on your mobile properties. As Kayla Green, Director of Digital Strategy at Saatchi & Saatchi (LA) says, you need to “design for the small screen.”
Mashable’s full screen ad format
This mobile-driven approach can mean using unique ad sizes and formats for your mobile properties, integrating ads into your content stream for a unified viewing experience, or even reducing the number of ads and increasing their viewability. For example, both BuzzFeed and Mashable are great at presenting ad formats that do well in the mobile environment, such as shareable images and video. They also excel at incorporating these ads into their editorial streams, so that the reader experience is not jarring. This can be through advertorials, design of the ad space matching the editorial content and optimized audience targeting.
The main goal on the mobile screen remains the same as desktop; presenting non-intrusive, non-confusing and engaging ads. However, what this means on each device differs, and you need to plan for that difference to make an experience that’s worth returning to.
User Data and Attribution
Content may have been King in the past, but it’s fast being overthrown by data. Targeting, retargeting, understanding reader interests to create tailored online experiences and a slew of other features all depend on data and analytics. This is where Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and other tech giants dominate the market. Through their services, these companies have gained a vast amount of first-party data on their users, which they can now leverage with advertisers.
The ability to collect valuable user information is not unique to these organizations however.
Publishers have access to a vast amount of data on reader interests and demographics, which — when tapped — can raise the value of their platform as advertisers seek access to targeted audiences.
While there are a number of ways to track and analyze desktop audiences and capitalize on that traffic however, mobile has been more elusive. Publishers often don’t have access to reader data such as behaviour and interests on mobile, which can make it difficult to target ads to a large portion of their audience.
One way to alleviate this issue is to implement a cross-platform login system that logs user data across devices. Then, as readers create profiles and use them to interact with content, their demographics and interests become clear.(For transparency, we offer robust Social Login and Audience Insights tools that can help publishers measure the full impact of their content on all devices). This information can be used to enrich the content and ads that appear in mobile, improving overall reader experience and ad value.
Seen a mobile tactic that’s particularly effective in publishing? Let’s chat in the comments below.
The post How Digital Publishers Are Cashing In On Increased Mobile Ad Spend appeared first on Viafoura.
