Find out why brands and agencies are focusing their advertising budgets on mobile and why as a mobile website owner you could be missing out on an opportunity to monetise your mobile website and content.
You don’t have to be a marketing guru to recognise the massive growth in mobile advertising over the last few years. Take a cursory glance at any marketing, advertising or brand-focused news site and you’ll find that every day a new article emerges championing the growth of mobile advertising and how digital marketers are re-allocating their advertising budget for video ads on the small screen. The concept of being able to engage an audience with captivating, rich-media advertising on a device as personal as a mobile phone is winning over brands and agencies around the world. As a result of this, media buyers and digital marketers are funnelling their advertising budgets to incorporate more of mobile. It appears that brands and agencies are ready for the switch to mobile but what about publishers and content owners?
In this blog we’ll be taking a look at some of the most important research and studies surrounding the growth of the mobile web and how this will positively affect mobile website owners and content publishers.
For mobile website owners or “publishers” monetisation of web traffic had traditionally been a difficult and arduous task due to the range of hardware, technologies and operating systems utilised in “feature phones”. The recent emergence of smartphones and their subsequent surge in popularity has made monetising users on the mobile web easier and faster than ever before – however, by focusing their efforts on the low hanging fruit of the smartphone market, publishers are missing out on a potentially significant revenue opportunity offered by feature phones. At AdSpruce, we’ve developed the technology to resolve this issue.
Websites which publish video content should consider if it’s optimised for feature phones. Many mobile devices are only able to play video using the YouTube player (when you embed YouTube videos into your website) or using the device’s native video player. If you have embedded a YouTube video in your website that was not uploaded by you, you’re unable to monetise it. So a better option is uploading videos direct to your website (without the use of third party software) which will use the native video player of any given mobile device. For websites that work with large volumes of content everyday, this may sound time consuming. But take a moment to consider this statistic:
“While smartphones have become an indispensable part of people’s daily lives in the developed part of the world, global smartphone penetration sits at a modest 21% of total global mobile phone subscriptions” (Webcertain, 2013).
Millions of people around the world right now are using feature phones instead of smartphones and for many of those people a mobile device is the first screen and also the only means by which they connect to the world wide web. Take India for example. In India there is a scarcity of fixed broadband, so more than half of the internet traffic from this region comes from mobile devices. When you consider that India has a population of over 1 billion people, that’s a huge potential of mobile web traffic that you could be monetising.
For many, there is a misconception that it is only consumers in developing countries that are feature phone users. However, according to a report by Webcertain just over half of the mobile phone subscriptions in the US are smartphones (58%), leaving 42% with feature phones – so brands targeting these regions could be missing out on a large market of potentially lucrative sales.
It’s undeniable however, that the smartphone and tablet market is set for rapid growth around the world. eMarketer estimates that by 2014 more than one in three people will own a tablet device, and according to Alexander Interactive, 52% of tablet owners prefer to shop on their tablet rather than their PC. This research indicates that tablets are an incredibly successful medium for advertising and when brands and agencies see ROI improve and sales revenue grow, there will be a increased demand for mobile video advertising as budgets are switched from desktop and TV to mobile.
In terms of the ROI possibilities that mobile advertising presents Google have also carried out extensive research into their tablet audience, finding that 72% of tablet owners make a weekly purchase on their tablet device. But that’s not all: Google describes the behaviour of consumers using a mobile device as “spontaneous” which means that advertising on these platforms is more likely to lead to a direct sale.
For content owners and publishers, there is also a need to not only monetise your mobile website, but also to create a great user experience. Research from Latitude concludes that 61% of mobile web users have a better opinion of brands when they offer a good mobile experience. Further evidence from Google supports this statement with their research identifying that 57% of people won’t recommend a brand that has a poorly designed mobile website.
To conclude, there is an undeniable market of feature phone users around the world that are yet unreached by mobile video advertising. Whilst it is likely that these consumers will eventually buy in to smartphone technologies, for the here and now advertisers and publishers need to adjust their technology to reach these individuals. It is clear from several studies that mobile advertising offers more spontaneous sales and an increased ROI for brands and agencies. As a publishers you too are able to benefit from the increased demand in mobile advertising. By optimising your website to deliver a great mobile web experience you’ll increase positive opinions of your brand. Selecting an advertising network to monetise your mobile website will enable you to deliver highly targeted and relevant advertising to your audience, and installing an SDK such as the one we provide at AdSpruce (the only mobile web SDK in the industry that enables video advertising on feature phones) will enable you to unlock new and potentially highly profitable revenue from a previously unmonetised audience.
If you’d like to start monetising your mobile website or if you already have an advertising SDK installed and are unsure if you’re tapping into the full potential of your website revenue, then get in touch with us at AdSpruce today to see how we can help.
