Jonathandunn.ca

As advertisers devote an increasing share of their media budgets to mobile advertising, experimental campaigns are morphing into sustained efforts.  Even those brands just getting started in the channel will have heard the success stories and won’t be satisfied with ‘seeing what happens’.

Results matter and maximizing ROI or driving toward pre-defined, tangible goals places increased pressure on effective campaign management and optimization. Clear and measureable campaign objectives are the essential starting point. Acknowledging mobile as a powerful direct response channel and building in conversion points will improve targeting efforts.

However, simply setting up your campaign and letting it run its course denies the opportunity to leverage the rich data set that mobile advertising generates. Device, time, content, creative, destination and conversion metrics are among the points across which a campaign can be evaluated. Knowing how to interpret and translate that data into in-flight campaign optimization can mean the difference between a successful campaign and a failure.

Let’s get some assumptions out of the way:

1. You’ve done your homework and have a good sense of which devices your target audiences are likely to be using (or you’re casting a wide net across mobile users).
2. You have a mobile-friendly post-click destination. If you’re driving to a wired web destination go back to the drawing board.
3. You have access to media and conversion performance data in the shape of publisher/network reporting and post click tracking using Google Analytics or a mobile analytics service.
4. You’re a savvy enough planner – or work with one – so your media buy is leveraging properties with good content affinity to your message and your audience.
5. You’re working with a publisher/network that will let you adjust campaign targeting in-flight.  (I’ve yet to work with one that won’t; it’s in their best interest.)

At the very least you’ll be seeing the top-line reach and response stats – impressions, clicks, and click through rates (CTRs). These are helpful in providing a baseline for measuring your optimization efforts.  Content, geographic, time and device-specific reporting are the next level of mineable data.

The second baseline measure will be conversions. If you’ve managed to get consumers to click on your ad, don’t simply direct them to a flat landing page. Instead, have some response or engagement points to take advantage of the click. With that in place, you’ll be able to generate conversion rates or engagement levels.

Now that you have your campaign set up and you’re collecting performance data, here’s a list of questions you need to ask yourself to identify opportunities that will enable performance improvement via ongoing optimization:

Media Metrics

1. What are you CTRs by creative unit? Run multiple calls to action or creative treatments and adjust weight according to performance.
2. What are you CTRs by time? Focus on day parting to deliver more impressions when your message has the greatest currency.
3. What are you CTRs by device? Device metrics go a long way towards validating audience profile assumptions and ensuring relevant offers, content and design strategies.
4. Which content or context (e.g. location) dimensions are performing best? Cross-reference those results with creative, time and device CTRs.
5. Are your mobile search keyword groups fully exploiting aligned location or urgency searches? Search is a low cost, high conversion channel when deployed sensibly and managed properly.

Conversion Metrics

1. What content is generating the most views on your landing pages? Remember, mobile content consumption will likely follow a different pattern from web browsing.
2. Are there choke points in your conversion funnel? With multi-page interactions (e.g. registrations), you may notice drop off at certain points. Streamline the process to minimize friction and maximize familiar behaviour triggers.
3. What are the conversion comparisons between different devices? Could your content or design strategy be adjusted to take advantage of device browser or feature capabilities?
4. How do your conversions compare across geographies? What happens when you layer on device data to that metric? How about time of day metrics? Tweak your media to follow those patterns.
5. If you’re attributing revenue to your conversions, are some sources more profitable than others? How are different offers translating to conversion rates?

While some of these might seem obvious and different conversion points (e.g. landing pages, downloads, coupons, commerce, etc.) have unique dimensions to address, the fulcrum for mobile advertising success is the effective use of the added data layers that mobile devices, context and design/content strategies offer.

Be Smart. Tip the scales in your favour by acting on in-campaign reporting.

NOTE: This post appears as part of Mobile Marketer’s Classic Guide to Mobile Advertising 2010 package. You can get the full guide here.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Increasing Relevance of Mobile-Initiated Search
• Helping Advertisers Capitalize on Publisher Mobile Analytics
• If you can build a bridge to anywhere, why pick a dead end?

During a recent keynote address at the IFA consumer electronics conference in Berlin, Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke of the “age of augmented humanity”. Grand language aside, the core of this statement is the convergence of massive amounts of knowledge and technology smart enough to operate autonomously enough to anticipate what we want to know and deliver it when we need it.

This will probably trigger all kinds of predictions and warnings about creepy scenarios of computers dominating humans but it has a real world utility as Mr. Schmidt highlights in this example: “When you ask ‘what’s the weather like?’ what you’re really asking is do I wear a raincoat or do I water the plants.”

This kind of contextual relevance has always been a cornerstone of mobile marketing but it’s increasingly relevant as location and activity aware Smartphones earn greater market share.  This is backed up by some stats Mr. Schmidt shared during the same keynote address:

• 1 in 3 queries from Smartphones are now seeking information about nearby places
• Google’s mobile search traffic grew 50 percent in first half of 2010

What these numbers indicate is that consumers are increasingly porting search activity previously confined to the desktop over to their mobile device and are adding in the layer of solving contextually relevant problems.

But let’s expand on the notion of contextual search and acknowledge that search activities occur outside of the traditional confines of the search engine. Here are a couple of search scenarios that occur within branded environments rather than traditional search engines:

• I’m looking for a place to eat. Rather than doing a Google search for restaurants, I fire up the Urban Spoon or Yelp apps.
• I want to see if there’s a Best Buy near me and if they have the case I need for my iPhone. I tap in their URL to my mobile browser, get served up their mobile optimized website and search for the product and the closest location where I can get it.

I could easily outline other scenarios but these two serve the purpose of highlighting two other mobile search behaviours:

• Activity-specific search enabled by a 3^rd party content aggregation application
• Direct to brand “search” (for a mobile friendly destination) based on aligned and pre-established preferences.

These activities already exist within web behaviour. However, many organizations are not yet optimized to capitalize on this type of discovery via mobile. Not addressing these behaviours can have unfortunate effects on both brand favourability and sales.

While it’s harder to influence 3^rd party apps, you can earn a lot of easy wins by having a mobile version of your website to address clicks out of apps or another 3^rd party source and direct to brand searches.

However, consumers are fickle when it comes to mobile browsing. If sites fail to load quickly or it’s hard to find what they’re looking for, they will quickly navigate away and look for other solutions. I can pretty much guarantee that’s happening if your website isn’t mobile optimized (and heaven forbid you’re using flash…warning: link requires high degree of geek).

So what are the steps you can take to ensure you’re capitalizing on mobile search activity?

I’d suggest focussing on three types of outcomes: 1. Ease of discovery; 2. Customer acquisition; 3. Maximizing conversions.

1. Discovery:

This is the most important activity and should begin with the question: “what happens when someone visits my website on their mobile device?” If the answer is anything other than ‘easily finds what they’re looking for thanks to a mobile-centric design and content strategy’, there’s work to do.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be overly time- and cost-consuming work.  A well thought out landing page that includes one or two of the most likely mobile actions (or relevant offers) and uses device detection to serve up the mobile version anytime a mobile browser hits the URL may be enough. In the long term, a more fully-formed site will be essential but a focus on addressing the most pressing problems a consumer visiting your site will be looking to solve is a great starting point.

The added advantage of a landing page is you can tailor it to serve as a destination for more concerted acquisition efforts. Or you can build multiple pages to serve unique purposes and campaigns given the lightweight development costs. If you invest proper time and thought in planning your landing page strategy, before you know it you’ll have the core of a robust mobile web experience.

2. Acquisition:

Having a mobile optimized site will go a long way towards driving down bounce rates and provide a valuable new set of data around device-specific use and general customer mobile preferences.

At the same time you’re addressing organic discovery, focus efforts on paid discovery. Mobile search is still a tiny sliver in the overall search revenue pie, but it’s a great time to capitalize on the increasing consumer use and the novelty factor.  While volume relative to wired search will be low, we’ve seen higher click-through and conversion rates on the whole.

Mobile search does require a distinct approach. Of course, there’s the post-click experience and device targeting dimensions and Google has done a great job rolling out innovative and compelling mobile-specific ad units that leverage mobile device features.  But you also have to consider the relevance of your offers and copy to the mobile customer as well as how the unique contextual dimensions of mobile will impact your keyword selections. Starting with brand terms is the obvious choice, but you might find that limiting in the mid to longer term.

3. Conversion:

Most of the common customer conversion best practices from web search still hold true. The new mobile specific dimensions worth mentioning here concern paying attention to streamlining the conversion funnel and ensuring a seamless bridging between any subsequent experiences.

Anything you can do to minimize the number of steps a consumer has to go through to complete the conversion cycle will be to your advantage. This includes data entry fields, number of pages until gratification, and clear and compelling explanations of a customer-centric value exchange.

On the subject of the value exchange, you will do better the more seamlessly you can bridge customers between two (or more) on-device experiences or enable a ‘clicks to bricks’ interaction that can be facilitated or enhanced through mobile use. Some common examples would be a click to a mobile coupon, sign up for a email newsletter that’s mobile optimized, or a push to a mobile download (app, ringtone, wallpaper, etc…).

The final point to consider in extracting the most benefit out of your mobile search activities is thorough use of analytics. Google Analytics, which you are probably already using for your website and web search activities, provides a more than adequate solution for extracting participation and conversion data. It will also allow you to gather insights into customer visits and actions by device or operating systems which will provide actionable insights for future campaign optimization and mobile property development.

The key to getting started in mobile search is to frame your activity with a test and learn mentality and be thoughtful about the end to end experience to minimize friction points for consumers. This will help you develop a sustainable brand presence in the mobile channel and extract an actionable data set.

Note: this has been cross-posted on the Digital Cement blog. Lots of other good content there too, fyi

Possibly Related Posts:

• Launch and Learn – Driving Campaign Success with In-Flight Optimization
• Helping Advertisers Capitalize on Publisher Mobile Analytics
• If you can build a bridge to anywhere, why pick a dead end?

Mobile will save publishing. Maybe. The iPad will save publishing. Maybe. Some yet to be imagined device will save publishing. Maybe. Let’s face it. We don’t know what will save publishing.

Or do we? Has the answer been in front of us the whole time? Maybe.

Advertisers will save publishing. That is a statement I will get behind. What will save publishing is giving advertisers compelling reasons to spend money. (Side note: by publishing I am referring to any media company that drives a significant portion of their revenue through advertising)

I don’t work for a content producer, but I have in the past.  I’m on the agency side and work with publishers on mobile advertising campaigns. What I’ve experienced has led me to two conclusions:

1. Mobile Publishing monetization models are still being worked out. (This is not what I want to talk about today but it’s a huge issue in mPublishing. And the crux may be what advertisers need to bring to the table vs. what services and solutions publishers should or can offer.)
2. Campaign analytics and reporting are still too shallow or are rarely packaged in a way that gets agencies – and by extension their clients – as excited as they should be.

Here’s my argument:

Publishers need to deliver targeting capabilities and usage analytics robust enough to allow media buyers to make intelligent campaign planning decisions. Otherwise, monetization attempts will mostly fail as marketers search for solid foundations for calculating customer targeting, engagement and acquisition ROI.

That sounds awfully grim. The good news is that the higher than web click through rates and the ‘innovation’ play will likely be sufficient to deliver enough revenue to keep everyone pretty happy – for now, that is.  So, before that, here is my take on merging analytics and targeting in a way that makes everyone look and feel good.

I’ve broken the analytics scope into four domains: Connectivity, Consumer, Content and Conversion. Each of these domains has multiple dimensions and for the purposes of this piece I’ll keep it pretty high level.

Domain # 1: Connectivity

This is one area where most publishers are doing a good job for the most part.  That may be largely to do with the approach many have taken in offering up OS-specific native applications. I’ve found it’s rare for a publisher not to be able to execute device targeting. Many can even target specific models within a family of devices (e. g. differentiate Blackberry 9700 from 8900). Increasingly, OS and device targeting should be the minimum expectation.

The second connectivity dimension is geo-targeting. Again, most publishers seem to grasp the inherent importance of location and context in mobile and have built-in capabilities to target location to some degree.

What’s critical here is the increasing granularity in OS, device and geo-targeting to enable messaging and offers that are relevant to device capabilities and user habits and preferences.  Check out Google’s location powered AdWord units.

Domain # 2: Consumer

You could make the case convincingly that location is a consumer domain but here the consumer domain also involves demographic and behavioural dimensions.  Publishers need to know who their audience is by age, gender, income, and so on. This is a stock media targeting request and it’s what advertisers expect. Admittedly, the personal nature of the device can make this information more difficult to gather as privacy hawks circle. But it’s not insurmountable.

The Weather Network in Canada asks for, but doesn’t require, age and sex information upon app activation. That’s a good start.  The mobile ad network JumpTap has created an ad preference manager where consumers can select the types of products and services they receive ads for – and that’s even better.

If location is the ‘where’ and demographic data the ‘who’, then the next ask is the ‘when’. Publishers need to be able to deliver sophisticated day parting options to allow advertisers to heavy up-spend at those times when consumption is heaviest or when their message will have the greatest currency.

Domain # 3: Content

This is basic. Publishers need to have visibility into what content is being consumed and to what degree. Beyond that, there has to be insight into how that differs by OS, device, demographics and geography.

Of course, there’s room for conventional reporting like total unique visitors and page views in aggregate. What’s more powerful, however, is knowing page views by content category, time per visit, frequency of user visits and duration of each visit, content viewed per visit, and content sharing. Each of these represents a potential targeting opportunity and the ability to deliver this data and wrap a story around the implications of these insights will make the case more compelling.

Domain # 4: Conversion

This final domain is a little harder for publishers to report on as they might lack the downstream visibility.  The CPM monetization model also lets a lot of publishers off the hook due to its diminished focus on performance.  The other challenge is the desire to manage advertiser expectations. Committing to a click through rate or conversion percentage is more risk than most publishers could stomach.  However, I’d urge more publishers to meet advertisers half way and offer CPC or CPA models to demonstrate more tangible returns from advertiser campaigns. This suggestion might be driven by a personal bias for mobile advertising as a very compelling direct response tactic than a pure brand play. We’ll see if the iAd changes that view.

The promise of being able to deliver micro-targeting reporting is the ability to have an analytics dashboard that tells when a 34 year old male using an Android device, clicked on an ad about Offer X, while viewing a specific piece of content and a certain time of day at a specific location and then moved through to conversion.

By and large, this is possible. There are privacy and permission issues that must be respected, especially with the location dimension but such nuance is very real. And to be fair, location is not always relevant. However, layering in some of the content dimensions I outlined would create a more powerful story.

The gap is what advertisers and their agencies seem to ask for and how it’s being packaged by publishers.  If publishers are serious about maximizing revenue from the mobile channel, they need to start offering reports at that level of detail, packaging it in a way that makes is clear, compelling and actionable without having to be asked for it or it being an exercise in pulling teeth.

It may sound like I’m being too tough on publishers here. However, I do believe most publishers are working hard to figure out the space and overcome the challenges. If anything, I have sterner words for agencies and advertisers that don’t ask for or mine for valuable data to optimize their buys or deliver device- and consumer- unfriendly post-click experiences.  I still see mobile ad campaigns that click through to a wired web experience or just offer banal product information without any clear or compelling follow-on call to action. It’s shocking!

My closing call to action: If information is power, then the power of the mobile channel is potentially unprecedented. The unique, personal and contextual dimensions of the device enable a granular picture of ad interaction and response. And it shouldn’t require a multi-million dollar budget (I’m looking at you iAd…). The data exists and we should use it wisely and in a way that benefits all parties – consumers, advertisers, agencies and publishers.

NOTE: As I’m in Canada, this is mostly directed at my fellow Canucks. Publishers and agencies in other parts of the world seem to be more on top of things (correct if that’s wrong…). But if anyone gets something out of this piece, I’m happy.

I’d also really welcome dialogue on the topic from publishers. I’ll admit to not having seen the full scope of every publisher’s mobile advertising and analytics offering. If you’re a publisher and are taking steps or have solutions to bridge these gaps, please share.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Launch and Learn – Driving Campaign Success with In-Flight Optimization
• Mobile + The New Direct White paper
• The Increasing Relevance of Mobile-Initiated Search
• Classic Guide to Mobile Commerce. Featuring…
• Recent @JCDunn Work Blog Posts

I prefer to focus on the positive, to give the benefit of the doubt, to believe your intentions were good. But sometimes you just have to say, “You can do better than that.”

Among the many apps currently eating up memory on my Blackberry is the Weather Network’s excellent WeatherEye. It’s a simple application that serves up contextually relevant information anytime I need it, anywhere I am. It’s also a great mobile success story. I don’t have the actual numbers, but I believe it’s been downloaded over 250 000 times in Canada. Not surprisingly, the Weather Network has monetized the application with display advertising and has attracted a number of high profile advertisers.

What makes mobile advertising attractive is the uncluttered environment, the ability to reach digitally savvy consumers that typically have higher than average incomes (or are young consumers – and who doesn’t want to reach them and start growing brand allegiance?), and high click throughs that would make most digital publishers drool.

Mobile advertising has been growing steadily over the past couple of years. The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s recent mobile revenue survey pegs the spend at $140 000 for 2007. That’s a sizeable increase over 2006’s $81 000 and I’d expect 2008 to show even better results. Small potatoes in the big picture but positive signs for an emerging ad channel.

So, take an uncluttered environment and an audience receptive to advertising and you have a powerful opportunity to nudge interest towards intent. This is why one recent mobile advertising experience left me scratching my head.

Back to the WeatherEye. While checking the weekend forecast, I noticed a banner ad from an automotive company (which shall remain nameless). Clicking on the ad, I was taken to a mobile internet site that had nothing more on it than the company’s logo and some brief marketing copy inviting me to stay tuned because the new models were coming soon. That’s it.

The problem with this is the missed opportunity to capture my interest and deliver me something of value. The advertiser could have:

•    Let me submit my email so they could send me a product brochure;
•    Provided click to call integration to connect me to their customer care centre;
•    Used the GPS on my Blackberry to help me locate the nearest dealer  and signed me up for a test-drive;
•    Provided a video of the car zooming around a racetrack or cityscape or some sugar shots of all the new features of this latest model. (Just like this BMW campaign did)
•    Let me forward the site URL via text to a friend who might also be interested in the car
•    Signed me up to an alerts service for new product info and exclusive offers such as a ‘sneak peak’ test drive
•    Delivered a coupon so I could get a discount on a ticket to the Auto Show
•    Entered me in a contest to potentially win a swag pack (heck, even the car if they really wanted to make a splash).

This advertiser failed to convert my interest and provide a meaningful brand experience, convert me into their CRM programming, drive me to retail or get me to share with someone else in my social graph. They had built a bridge to nowhere and I got there fast, just not in their latest model.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Four Mobile Web Experiences You Can Offer Customers
• The 3 Dimensions Of Effective Mobile Email
• Launch and Learn – Driving Campaign Success with In-Flight Optimization
• 5 Steps To Address Mobile Customer Fragmentation
• Mobile + The New Direct White paper