It finally happened — 2015 was the year that mobile ad spend was greater than desktop. Chew on these numbers for a minute:
- Mobile became the highest percentage of digital ad spend to date at 52.4 percent
- $30.45 billion was spent on mobile advertising
- It’s projected that mobile advertising will account for 50.2 percent of all internet advertising by in 2018
The numbers show mobile is here to stay. But how can we, as marketers, fully use it to its full capacity?
Mind the Gap
Mobile ecommerce accounts for just 30 percent of all US ecommerce, generating $104.05 billion. Nevertheless, by 2020 consumer behavior is projected to catch up to the ad dollars being spent with 45 percent of total ecommerce expected to transact on mobile, generating roughly $284 billion in sales.
It would make sense that if the majority of ad dollars are being spent on mobile, then mobile should be generating the most conversions and/or revenue. But that’s simply not the case for commerce — at least not yet. Yes, some percentage of the discrepancy will diminish organically, as consumer confidence increases and mobile continues to dominate the digital landscape. However, sales (or conversions) do not exist in a vacuum.
A mobile device is now the primary touch point used by consumers, but desktop and laptop computers still play a role — just not as much. High-consideration conversions are a much harder sale to make on a mobile phone than a desktop. The importance and the seeming complexity of the checkout process deters mobile conversions. However, consumers might research a product on mobile — perhaps initiated by viewing a mobile ad — but without a cross-device tracking solution the true value of mobile cannot be understood. And mobile should get the credit it deserves for the role it plays in the transaction.
Measuring the Impact
As users flow between multiple devices, they become influenced by different ads and, in fact, use different devices for different tasks. In 2012, Google released a report stating that while 65 percent of online shopping started on a mobile device, 61 percent of that traffic was later continued on a desktop or laptop computer. While that report is surely outdated, and the number of sessions continued on a desktop/laptop computer has definitely been reduced, the trend remains. While desktop/laptop traffic is shifting to mobile, that traffic still converts at a higher level, as consumers often have researched and understood exactly what they’re looking for when they switch to a personal computer for conversion.
MediaMath’s own identity management product allows marketers to understand behavior across devices and, subsequently, optimize their own advertising and conversion processes from the insights gained. So perhaps, while the conversion is taking place on desktop, the process was started on mobile as a result of an ad viewed. Mobile is the new hub of a persona’s digital identity and, as such, must be linkable to other device activity.
Mobile Behavior
Mobile has completely different usage patterns than a desktop/laptop computer. The average American adult cell phone owner interacts with their mobile around 150 times per day. Further, it’s projected US smartphone and tablet users spend four hours and six minutes per day on “non-voice” activity. That means each interaction on a device has an average span of 1:38 — yes, there are obviously longer interactions with more attention placed on the device and content, and the “check-in” where users are simply looking for notifications.
According to a Quantcast presentation at Mobile Media Summit 2015, mobile users are between 30 to 50 percent more likely to convert during morning and evening commutes than at other parts of the day. So what does this mean? We need to place more emphasis on the impact of mobile checkout flows, be it native or in-app. These optimized and user-centric conversion funnels will provide a simple, clean and friendly way for users to convert. Marketers must adapt to the tendencies of mobile users, their behavioral patterns and intent when on a mobile device. This not only includes the time of day a user is interacting with mobile, but what that time of day means to them. Location, no doubt, plays a major role in this as well.
Optimize for Mobile
Marketers must start thinking about the mobile conversion or checkout process in a dramatically different way than they do the desktop checkout process. When mobile checkout requires too much work, it becomes discouraging to the user. Speaking to Nick Kroetz, a senior UX designer at Prolific Interactive, he explains, “You never want users to think about the checkout process, and the moment they do is when you lose their trust.” The checkout process should be organic, as some mobile retailers begin to leverage technologies like Apple Pay and simplified native checkout flows, the conversion rate increases, as friction to checkout decreases. Nick continues, “I often see users trying to pinch to zoom in on form fields, or being let down about an expectation that their information should have been saved for them.”
The moral here is that marketers must invest in the research and technologies in order to entice users to convert on mobile. Failure to do that is a huge opportunity lost. At the very least, marketers must truly measure the impact mobile has across devices. It’s no longer trivial. Following suit will bridge the divide between the ad dollars spent on mobile and the actual revenue mobile generates.