Editorial Articles

Given the hundreds of news items about Google’s purchase of AdMob and Apple’s acquisition of Quattro Wireless in recent months, you’d have to have had your head firmly buried in the sand not to have noticed that changes are afoot in the world of media buying and selling.

Advertising – particularly mobile advertising - is one of the last significant business sectors that still relies on lots of human beings to perform each transaction. It’s a market ripe to embrace technology for automation and simplification of a business process. Enter the mobile ad network.

With mobile ad networks advertisers can more effectively target and reach critical audiences while gaining substantial media buying power and efficiencies. Publishers, particularly smaller ones, gain greater access to advertiser demand and a chance to carve out their share of the growing mobile ad revenue pie.

Perhaps not the first – or the most obvious – factor to consider for advertisers and publishers alike – is the speed and availability of your mobile website. What impact can this possibly have? The answer is simple: it can have a big impact.

The web performance challenge for mobile advertisers
Many mobile ad networks guarantee results and demonstrate ROI to their mobile advertiser customers through click-per-action (CPA) pricing or click-per-thousand (CPM) pricing with CPA targets. However, mobile advertisers must also play a role in driving these metrics with strong performing mobile Web landing pages.

Having the mobile ad network deliver the ad to a publisher’s mobile website is just half the story. The second half is all about how quickly the ad loads when it’s been clicked. Both halves of the story are important but arguably the second half – the waiting time – is critical.

Research shows the amount of time a user will generally wait for a website to load is down to three seconds or less. Today’s users make no special allowances for the mobile web. A recent mobile web performance survey shows users expect mobile websites to load as fast, if not faster than those they visit using desktop PCs.

The key takeaways:
 

• No matter how fast or reliable a selected mobile ad network may be, a mobile advertiser’s investments will fall short if their own mobile landing pages and websites are not on par;
• Mobile advertisers must optimise mobile website performance to take full advantage of all that mobile ad networks have to offer;
• Mobile advertisers need to understand performance from the true perspective of users on a wide range of devices and in a variety of geographies;
• Mobile advertisers can then proactively identify which user segments may be experiencing a slow-down and take the steps needed to quickly isolate and fix performance-impacting elements including carrier connections, devices, browsers, etc.

Publishers: delivery of great mobile experiences can be tricky
For publishers, mobile ad networks present a significant opportunity but also a potential liability, since ad delivery represents another piece of third-party content adding to a publishers’ mobile website. Third-party content can account for an overwhelming majority of the time it takes for a site to load. If a publisher’s mobile website loads slowly, chances are users will click away before they even have a chance to view the ads coming into the publisher’s site.

In order to maximise their mobile ad network strategies, publishers need to proactively optimise mobile web performance. And this means understanding how their website is performing – for all users, regardless of the device they are using or the browser they choose. In addition it means understanding the impact new ad content may have on that performance – and being prepared to make changes if required. For example, if a set of ads is bandwidth-intensive but offers high revenue-generating potential, the publisher may consider “lightening” other areas of their mobile website that don’t offer as much upside in order to maintain fast download speeds.

Offering a mobile service (in any context) is challenging. But with the right strategy in place mobile advertisers and publishers alike can better leverage this new marketing medium and monetise content. 

David Flower
VP EMEA, Gomez