Mobile programmatic "on the fingers": the revolution will be velvet

Introduction

The global online advertising market is on the verge of a "mobile" revolution - this is evidenced by the figures from a study by Wallblog . According to him, the share of expenses for mobile programmatic in the UK for the first time exceeded the costs of online advertising for personal computers.

5 billion people in the world have mobile phones, and only 4.1 billion people have toothbrushes.

- as announced at the MobileBeat-2016 conference . We analyzed the studies of foreign colleagues and collected data on the development of mobile programmatic in the Russian market.

The volume of the Russian programmatic market as a whole has not yet reached the scale similar to the market in the USA and Great Britain, and amounts to 5 billion rubles according to IAB Russia . In Russia, the following notable players can be considered leaders in the mobile programmatic market: Data-Centric Alliance with its programmatic platform Exebid.DCA, MADNETeX, iVengo, WapStart, Mobiads, AdWired, DYYD. The most relevant at the moment is a review of the mobile market participants on the Mobile Ad Map from IAB Russia.

Despite the fact that mobile programmatic occupies only 0.8% of the total Internet advertising market in Russia, it already accounts for 15% of the total programmatic market (i.e., about 750-770 million rubles) according to the results of 2015. For comparison, the mobile programmatic market in the United States accounts for 60.5% (in money terms of $ 9.33 billion) of the total programmatic volume, whose growth is forecasted to be almost 40% in 2016 , to $ 21.55 billion . In the UK, in 2016 the programmatic market is expected to grow by 37%, to programmatic mobile will take up $ 4.12 billion and 58.7% of the market.

What is mobile programmatic?

Algorithmic advertising (Programmatic Buying) is the process of automated (programmable) sale and purchase of advertisements using various algorithms. Most often, it is understood that purchasing algorithms have a focus on users with certain socio-demographic and behavioral characteristics (audience targeting).

The technology allows marketers to personalize the advertisement as much as possible and demonstrate them to the target audience of the product in automatic mode. Modern users are much more likely to go online from smartphones or tabletsthan from a personal computer (PC), and mobile devices are in the spotlight of advertisers. Marketers are aware that demonstrating online advertising on such devices is a unique opportunity to attract a generation of millennials (Generation Y) to purchase, but they do not always understand how the new technology works.

In the UK, in a country with a developed Internet market, business is actively continuing to get acquainted with the capabilities of mobile programmatic. However, according to a study by the English division of the IAB interactive advertising bureau , 44% of British advertisers are still unaware of the possibilities offered by mobile programmatic technology. In the USA, the mobile segment in 2015 reached 60.5%programmatic segment volumes, which proves the effectiveness of the new channel.

Experts in Russia note a gradual reorientation of advertisers to mobile advertising placements. “Mobile currently has the greatest potential. Huge amounts of inventory and significantly better contact make it the channel of the future ... You can expect an advertising mobile boom in the near future, ” says Ekaterina Filippova, head of research at the Digital BBDO advertising and communications group .

An increase in the share of mobile placements in the Russian advertising market is also predicted by Dmitry Kuznetsov, Google Marketing Director in Russia.

In general, Russians have become more likely to buy online from mobile devices and all major e-commerce playersnote that the proportion of orders through mobile applications is growing. At the beginning of 2016, on average, orders from mobile devices, according to various estimates, accounted for from 15% to 24% of all purchases of Russians on the Internet - in 2015 this share grew by more than 1.5 times. The

mobile segment continues to grow and prerequisites There is no way to reduce the popularity of mobile gadgets - this is one of the main trends in the field of online commerce. Through mobile applications, half of all online sales will soon be realized if growth in technology penetration and changes in consumer habits remain at the same level, experts say.

Benefits of mobile programmatic

In mobile advertising, two significant and often disjoint segments should be distinguished:

• placement of classic websites on mobile traffic (adapted or not adapted for small screens)
• and placement in mobile applications.

The latter, in terms of available inventory, makes up about 70% of the total volume of mobile traffic in Russia (according to Exebid.DCA).

There is much more information about a mobile application that displays an ad than information about a website. Various details about the site application can be found, for example, in the Google Play and App Store app stores themselves: site name, content category (games, utilities, books, children's applications, etc.), age limit, site rating, number of installations, comments about the application and much more.

The fact of the presence of the application in the Google Play and App Store indicates that the application contains licensed content and meets the stringent requirements for its security. For example, each application before entering the App Store undergoes a difficult stage of verification on a variety of points by Apple specialists, so the content-safety expertise is carried out by a third party, not a platform, agency or programmatic platform. This allows the advertiser to be guaranteed that his advertisements will not be adjacent to various kinds of inappropriate content. In the mobile channel, brands get an absolutely safe platform for communication with potential consumers.

These advantages are diluted with a significant lack of advertising on mobile devices, which is associated with a steady behavioral trend - mobile devices are used to familiarize themselves with the product (search, comparison and selection), but not for purchase. Users prefer to buy on a personal computer, and choose on a mobile device .

Thus, when analyzing the effectiveness of advertising campaigns in the mobile segment, there may be a misleading impression of the inefficiency of this channel, since the target action is performed on another device and is attributed as organic - free. It should also be noted that despite the fact that they are increasingly accessing the Internet from a mobile device, the session time on the site is much shorter than for traffic from a PC. The latter leads to the fact that some classical metrics in the analysis of campaign effectiveness are not applicable.

Experts suggest that introducing technology to advertisers will helpdebunking stereotypes and its wider dissemination. Marketers require maximum transparency in the process of purchasing advertising space, they want to control the prices of work equipment and fully understand the strategy chosen by the advertiser. Mobile programmatic provides them with these features.

A separate feature of mobile advertising is the illusion of banner blindness, which is also manifested in large quantities for display placements. Mobile app advertisements also suffer from banner blindness, but to a much lesser extent, especially for video and native formats.

While most of the market, unfortunately, still relies on traditional advertising and fights banner blindness, innovative advertisers are trying to make an advertisement that would bring the involved users to mobile advertisers.

- notes Ana Moniz, AppLift designer .

For mobile, as for any other advertising channels, the use of transparent DSP platforms is typical, allowing you to analyze the effectiveness of ads and understand how much you need to pay a media resource - the owner of the advertising space. This is the difference between mobile programmatic technologies and the already outdated model of online advertising with "wholesale" purchase of space and opaque pricing models for this purchase. At the same time, the threshold for entering a mobile advertising channel using programmatic technologies is significantly lower compared to the bulk purchase of advertising space. The cost of displaying an ad in CPM for mobile traffic is significantly lower than through other channels, but increases, which is logical, with a narrowing of the target audience.

Effective Promotional Messages

In order to make a mobile advertising campaign effective, in most cases, you need to change the standard approach to the design and functionality of ads broadcast through classic advertising channels. It is necessary to take into account the screen size of the device on which the user will see the advertising message, and its functionality, adapt the advertising site itself and configure analytics for it in a special way - to offer the owner of a smartphone or tablet the most attractive interactive advertising.

Keep in mind that Flash banners or their partial counterparts, the so-called Swiffy banners, are not suitable for mobile placements. As a functional alternative, for example, Celtra and Crisp provide advertisers with design tools for creating “high-content” mobile ads using the IAB MRAID1.0 / 2.0 standard. Such ads can replace all the functionality of the site and even be a full replacement for it.
Ads of this format can be used on most mobile advertising platforms and can increase the effectiveness of an advertising campaign up to 10 times. Examples of such ads can be tested in action, for example, here - Celtra Standard Ad .

Performance analysis

According to Google Russia, in 2014, 62% of users used mobile devices to search for product information, and 39% of users made a purchase from their smartphone at least once. It was also noted that, for example, in the retail segment, the user's path to buying, which began with a search on a mobile device, ended with the target action on the same device only in 3% of cases .

To analyze performance-campaigns in a mobile channel, classical methods of attribution of a target action are not enough, it is important to use the modern capabilities of analytics systems, for example, Analytics Client Idwith the help of which Analytics can connect actions that occur on different devices with each other (for example, when a user sees ads on one device and converts on another).

Mobile video advertising can be a complete replacement for expensive TV placements or complement them as part of an incremental reach strategy. Moreover, the use of a mobile channel allows you to reach an audience that often does not watch TV shows at all. Moreover, it is possible to analyze the effectiveness of such reach advertising campaigns using the Brand Lift methodology in a mobile channel than with display, TV or outdoor placements.

When working in a mobile channel, you need to be prepared for high so-called failure rates: if on PC the average failure rate is 42%, then for tablets it is about 49%, and for phones it is almost 60% . This forces website designers and developers to conduct whole studies to improve the site’s usability when using them on a mobile device. The most obvious mistakes that increase the rate of mobile traffic failure by an order of magnitude include:

• using the start-up screens “Turn your device to a horizontal position ...”,
• placing on the site various kinds of full-screen advertisements,
• lack of adaptation of text input forms.

The most correct approach to optimizing the usability of a mobile site consists in continuous A / B testing, while for each platform iOS, Android OS or Windows, conflicting test results can be obtained due to the fact that users of different operating systems have different habits and expectations from interfaces.

Conclusion

Along with the penetration of gadgets and mobile Internet, mobile advertising will develop rapidly. According to forecasts of various agencies , the size of the mobile advertising market in 2016 will reach 23-25 ​​billion rubles. The development of a mobile advertising channel is already changing the media landscape in a very serious way: the desktop audience of the main platforms is reduced, new formats of media, contextual and native placements are being introduced. In the spontaneously changing conditions of the advertising market, it is necessary to rely on the rich experience of foreign colleagues, especially on impressive international expertise in working with mobile users.

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The publication presents an extended version of the article What is a mobile programmer .