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

Introduction

The global online advertising market is on the verge of a “mobile” revolution, according to the Wallblog research figures . According to him, the share of spending on a mobile programmatic in the UK for the first time exceeded the cost 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 research of foreign colleagues and collected data on the development of a mobile programmatic in the Russian market.

The volume of the Russian programmatic market as a whole does not yet reach a scale similar to the market in the US and the UK, and is 5 billion rubles according to IAB Russia . In Russia, the leaders of the mobile programmatic market include the following notable players: Data-Centric Alliance with its programmatic platform Exebid.DCA, MADNETeX, iVengo, WapStart, Mobiads, AdWired, DYYD. The most relevant at the moment is an overview of the mobile market participants on the Mobile Ad Map from IAB Russia.

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

Algorithmic advertising (eng. Programmatic Buying) is a process of automated (programmable) sales and purchases of advertisements using various algorithms. Most often, procurement algorithms are meant to focus on users with certain socio-demographic and behavioral characteristics (classroom targeting).

The technology allows marketers to personalize the advertisement as much as possible and show them to the target audience of the product automatically. Modern users are much more often connected to the network from smartphones or tablets than from a personal computer (PC), and mobile devices are at the center of attention of advertisers. Marketers realize that the demonstration of 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, the business actively continues to get acquainted with the possibilities of mobile programmatic. However, according to a study of the English division of the interactive advertising bureau IAB , 44% of British advertisers are still not aware of the possibilities offered by the mobile programmatic technology. In the USA, the mobile segment in 2015 reached 60.5% of the programmatic segment, which proves the effectiveness of the new channel.

Experts in Russia note the gradual reorientation of advertisers to mobile advertising placements. “Mobile currently has the most potential. Huge volumes of inventory and significantly higher-quality contact make it the channel of the future ... Advertising mobile boom can be expected soon, ” says Ekaterina Filippova, head of the research department of the advertising and communication group Digital BBDO .

Dmitry Kuznetsov, director of marketing for Google in Russia, also predicts an increase in the share of mobile placements in the Russian advertising market.

In general, Russians began to more often buy online from mobile devices and all the major e-commerce players state that the share of orders through mobile applications is growing. At the beginning of 2016, on average, orders from mobile devices, according to various estimates, account for from 15% to 24% of all purchases of Russians on the Internet - in 2015 this share increased by more than 1.5 times

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

Advantages of mobile programmatic

Mobile advertising should distinguish two significant and often non-overlapping segments:

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

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

Information about the mobile application in which the advertisement is shown is much more than information about the website. Various details about the application site 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 app and more.

The fact that the application is present in the Google Play and App Store stores indicates that the application contains licensed content and meets the stringent requirements for its security. For example, each application, before appearing in the App Store, goes through a difficult stage of testing on a multitude of points by Apple experts; thus, content-safety expertise is carried out by a third party, not a site, agency or programmatic platform. This allows the advertiser to guarantee that his advertisements will not coexist with various kinds of unwanted content. In the mobile channel, brands get an absolutely safe platform for communication with potential consumers.

These advantages are diluted by a significant disadvantage of advertising placements on mobile devices, which is associated with a steady behavioral trend — mobile devices are used to get familiar with the product (search, compare, and select), but not to buy. 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 can be a deceptive 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 the Internet is increasingly coming out from a mobile device - the session time on the site is much shorter than for PC traffic. The latter leads to the fact that some classical metrics in the analysis of the effectiveness of the campaign are not applicable.

Experts believe that familiarizing advertisers with the technology will contribute to the elimination of stereotypes and its wider dissemination. Marketers require maximum transparency of the process of purchasing advertising space, they want to control the prices of working inventory and fully understand the strategy chosen by the advertiser. Mobile programmatic provides them with these opportunities.

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

While the majority of the market, unfortunately, still relies on traditional advertising and struggles with banner blindness, innovative advertisers are trying to create ads that bring in the involved users to mobile advertisers.

- notes Ana Moniz, designer AppLift .

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

Effective advertising messages

To make a mobile ad campaign effective, in most cases you need to change the standard approach to the design and functionality of ads that are 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 customize analytics for it in a special way - offer the most attractive interactive advertising to the owner of a smartphone or tablet.

It must be remembered that Flash-banners or their partial analogues, 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 according to 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 sites 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 information about products, and 39% of users made a purchase at least once from a smartphone. It also noted that, for example, in the retail segment, the user's path to purchase, which began with a search on a mobile device, ended with a target action on the same device only in 3% of cases .

For analyzing performance campaigns in the mobile channel, classical classical methods of attribution of target action are not enough, it is important to use modern capabilities of analytics systems, for example, so-called. Google Analytics Client Id, with which Analytics can communicate with each other actions that take place on different devices (for example, when a user sees advertising on one device and performs conversion on another).

Mobile video advertising can be a full-fledged replacement for expensive TV placements or complement them within an incremental reach strategy. Moreover, the use of a mobile channel allows you to reach the audience that often does not watch TV shows at all. At the same time, it is possible to conduct an analysis of the effectiveness of such outreach advertising campaigns using the Brand Lift technique in a mobile channel than with display, TV or outdoor placements.

Working in the mobile channel, you must be ready for high so-called. bounce rates: if on a PC, the average bounce rate is 42%, then for tablets it is about 49%, and for phones it is almost 60% . This forces designers and website developers to conduct entire research in order to improve the website's convenience when using them on a mobile device. The most obvious failures, which increase the rate of mobile traffic failures by an order of magnitude, include:

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

The most appropriate approach to optimizing the usability of a mobile site is continuous A / B testing, while for each iOS, Android OS or Windows platform, conflicting test results can be obtained because 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 also develop at high rates. According to forecasts of various agencies , the volume of the mobile advertising market in 2016 will reach 23-25 ​​billion rubles. The development of a mobile advertising channel is already seriously changing the media landscape: the desktop audience of the main sites is declining, 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 is an extended version of the article What is mobile programmatic .