Christian Louca
With thanks to: Mobyaffiliates
Author Archive
Tamome CEO shares his vision of mobile & technology with launch of his new business
Posted: November 16, 2012 in Ad Industry, Advertising, Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Networks, Affiliates, Digital Display Advertising, Digital Marketing, Display advertising, Industry News, Information communications technology, M-Commerce, Marketing, Mobile Ad Networks, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Affiliate Networks, Mobile Affiliation, Mobile Developers, Mobile Industry News, Mobile Search, Mobile SEM, Mobile Technology, Performance Advertising, SEM, SEO, Tablets, Tamome, Technology, Technology Evolution, Technology Theory, Wireless TechnologiesTags: advertising marketplace, Internet, market segment, Mobile Advertising, Technology, utility suppliers
Tamome – Mobile Affiliate Advertising Marketplace launched by Founder & CEO Christian Louca
Calling Partnerships
As Founder & CEO of Tamome I announce we are open for partnerships within the mobile affiliate advertising market sector. The Tamome team have been quietly building our technology since February of this year and we are now live with major clients. We are looking to extend partnerships with advertisers, affiliates, publishers and app developers. The time has come for the birth of mobile affiliation, a massively overlooked market segment that warrants some attention.
We have strong ambitions to drive this froward; with all our knowledge, insight, motivations, passion and general love of the industry we hope to disrupt the market through creating exciting opportunity for all our partners and partners customers alike. We invite you to participate in the next generation of mobile advertising.
A little bit of vision
With smartphone and tablet penetration accelerating across the globe and with more and more people using this as their means to stay connected with the world; always on, always connected and always with us. This has become the preferred method of; communicating with friends, family, colleagues, TV Shows, entertainment, finding out what is happening in the world, sharing content on a global scale in seconds, navigating our way around the worlds cities and towns, letting our utility suppliers know how much we owe them, staying in touch with what is important to us, researching, understanding perceived value of anything through to buying digital goods, products or services and making payments. It is no wonder that in such a short period of time where this is happening right in front of our eyes, we still cannot even begin to imagine where it will take us in the future.
Technology is so powerful; it has allowed the human race to advance in ways that were just simply not even conceivable before its time. ‘Before its time’…I am not sure what I mean by that. Since technology has been around longer than the human race. It seems strange even writing that; but I believe the reality of technology starts with life itself and the evolution of the world that we know and live in today. Mobile technology is just one element of a whole world of biological and non-biological technology evolutions. Non-biological evolutions need a creator, a creator can exist because of biological evolutions. Make sense? I think ‘technology’ is an almost impossible thing to define but I think we have to split this in these two pieces.
Biological Evolution of living technology
‘Technology that were Creators’
Biological evolution of the Human Race
Non-Biological Evolution of non-living technology
with the biological evolution of technology that were creators
‘technology that was created’
Technology that was made by technology that were creators
So it should be clear now that mobile sits within the Technology that was made by Technology that were creators space. Why is this important? We need to understand the context of the bigger picture rather than just looking at mobile.
Technology evolution depends on its creators. That is you and I. Creators evolve according to their natural evolution (remember we are biological technology). Now the lines start to blur because you could ask ‘are we evolving according to the technology that we are creating?’ Anyway, another time for that one.
We have since life began carved, manufactured, developed, created concepts of technology to ultimately make our existence on earth enriched, easier and healthier. The internet has enabled us to put all our thoughts, ideas and concepts all into one place, like a giant brain. Thanks to mobile technology this brain is now accessible to us all across the connected world like being on a drip. We can open it and close it as and when we feel. Its always there, its always on but we are in control as to when we use it to make our days enriched, easier or healthier. This is the power of mobile and why like no other industry it is growing at a rate that we have never seen before anywhere else in our time. I am proud to be part of such an amazing evolution of technology and communication that is simply extraordinary.
Christian Louca
Mobile advertising hits £500m in 2012
Posted: October 9, 2012 in Ad Industry, Advertising, Digital Display Advertising, Digital Trends, Display advertising, Industry News, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Industry News, Mobile SearchTags: Advertising, Business, Facebook, Google, IAB, Internet Advertising Bureau, Mobile, Mobile Advertising, Mobile phone, Mobile Search, PwC, uk internet advertising
Posted By } Mark Sweney guardian.co.uk,
The explosion in the popularity of smartphones and tablets has led to mobile advertising revenues nearing £500m in 2012. Photograph: Lee Jae-Won/Reuters
The explosion in popularity of smartphones, tablets and the app revolution has fuelled a more than doubling in mobile advertising to £500m this year – just four years after the sector struggled to attract £25m.
UK mobile advertising grew a staggering 132% in the first six months of this year to £181.5m, according to the latest Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) report conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Breakneck growth is continuing in the second half – fuelled by the popularity of Apple and Google’s app stores as smartphone ownership nears 60% of the UK’s adult population – with forecasts putting UK mobile spend at as much as £511m for the full year.
In 2011, the IAB put mobile ad spend at £203m.
Mobile display and video advertising almost doubled in the first six months this year to £50m, with mobile search soaring by more than 150% to £132m.
Mobile search accounts for almost three-quarters of all UK mobile ad spend.
Total UK internet advertising spend rose 12.6% year on year in the first six months to £2.59bn, comfortably on track to pass £5bn for the year. The total digital display advertising market, including mobile, rose 10.6% in the first half to £591m.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of the rise of digital display advertising, albeit not on mobile, has been Facebook. Enders Analysis puts Facebook UK’s full-year ad revenues at £236m, a healthy 35% year-on-year rise.
However, these figures actually represent a cut of 18% on more bullish estimates made earlier in the year.
Enders analyst Ian Maude said the downgrade is the result of factors including a steeper-than-expected slowdown in the rate of Facebook’s ad revenue growth, marketers reassessing the value of ploughing money into gathering friends and likes to brand pages, and the social networking site’s well-documented struggle to make money out of mobile.
Jamie Matthews, chief executive of Initials Marketing, believes the scope for growth for mobile marketing remains massive.
“The £500m mark is just the start,” he says. “Facebook is racing to develop a mobile ad strategy to tap into its 550 million monthly mobile users, and more than half of big companies do not yet have a coherent mobile marketing strategy. I would expect mobile advertising to continue to grow at a staggering rate for some years yet.”
The biggest segment of the internet advertising market continues to be paid-for searches, which are dominated by Google.
Spend on search advertising rose 16% in the first half to crack £1.5bn, a 60% share of the overall market.
The rise of mobile ad spend in the UK
2008: £25.45m
2009: £37.6m, up 32% year on year
2010: £83m, up 116% year on year
2011: £203m, up 157% year on year
2012: £181.5m in the first half, up 132% year on year.
Via: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/oct/09/mobile-advertising-500-million-pounds-2012?newsfeed=true
Infographic – Mobile Advertising Landscape (The Players)
Posted: August 1, 2012 in Ad Industry, Advertising, Display advertising, Industry News, Location Based Services, Mediation Platforms, Mobile Ad Exchanges, Mobile Ad Networks, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Platforms, UncategorizedTags: Ad Servers, Agencies, Analytics, Demand Side Platforms, Discovery, In App Payments, LBS, Mediation Platforms, Mobile Ad Networks, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Analytics, mobile exchanges, Rich Media, RTB, Search, video, virtual currency
Crazy Social Media Info Graph – Confused?
Posted: May 18, 2012 in Advertising, Digital Marketing, Industry News, Marketing, Media & Entertainment, Mobile Applications, Mobile Social Media, Mobile Social networking, Multichannel Marketing, Online, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking, TechnologyTags: Advertising, Blogger, Buddy Media, Clickable, Facebook, Pinterest, social media, Twitter, Zynga
Guardian mobile site drives mores unique browsers & traffic than apps & tablets combined but where is the engagement?
Posted: May 17, 2012 in Digital Marketing, Industry News, Information communications technology, Internet, Media & Entertainment, Mobile Applications, Mobile Industry News, Mobile Internet, Mobile Platforms, Mobile Technology, Online, Publishing, Publishing Industry, Tablets, Technology, Uncategorized, User Experience & UsabilityTags: Android, App store, App Store (iOS), Guardian, Handhelds, iOS, iphone, iTunes, Mobile, Mobile phone, mobile statistics, mobile web, Page view, Smartphone, Statistics, The Guardian
the guardian (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It has been some time since I first remember trying to sign The Guardian to the YOC media network, sometime in 2009. From memory at the time, 4th Screen were selling around 1 million page views per month. I have posted below the latest figures from their site**, that figure now stands at 6.2 million and generates more unique browsers and monthly page views than their iOS, Android and iOS tablet apps combined. These figures are somewhat surprising but not because their mobile internet has the biggest pull, rather that their mobile traffic has only 6 fold in 4 or so years and all their mobile channels are not generating significant page impressions.
I have always been an advocate for mobile internet and I do get and understand that having an app strategy for print and digital publishers makes perfect sense. After all, I have personally been involved in building so many for clients as such, why wouldn’t I think this. My bigger question is why is their mobile internet site and apps not generating higher levels of uniques or monthly page impressions? We know they have an award winning app and their paid for model seemed to work and made them a small profit after development costs.
But… why is their mobile internet site generating far less monthly page impressions in ratio to their applications? And… are their applications generating enough impressions in ratio to the unique users?
Mobile Internet
Generating 6.2 million page impressions from 2.5 million unique browsers can be averaged out that for every one customer visiting the site once a month is only generating 2.5 page impressions per visit. I am guessing that their customers are visiting more than once a month which would mean they are generating even less impressions per visit (just divide the impression number by the number of visits). As you can see from these states it becomes somewhat disappointing and raises some concern. Maybe I am interpreting unique browsers wrongly as unique users, but it sounds like the same thing to me.
The iphone app is a little better…
Again applying the same principle generating 1 million page impressions from 34,000 uniques can be averaged out that for every 1 customer using the app once a month is generating about 30 impressions per visit. Like their mobile internet users the reality is they are visiting more than once a month and therefore the impressions they generate per visit are even less.
Lets look at the rest, again applying the same methodology…
iPad app
45,113 monthly uniques generating 3.45 million page impressions equates to 1 customer visiting once a month generating 75 page impressions per visit.
Android app
11,000 monthly uniques are generating 1.2 million page impressions equates to 1 customer visiting once a month generating 110 page impressions per visit.
What does this all mean?
In summary, it shows that their Android app is generating a much richer experience than their other channels. Or maybe Android users are just more engaged than iOS users. We have to be careful here as their mobile internet site will have traffic from all devices but overall the statistics suggest that most of their mobile site users are less engaged than their app users.
In my experience, working with print and digital publishers it is typical for a user to generate up to 10 impressions per visit but at an absolute minimum of visiting the site or apps 2 to 3 times a week. This would mean you would have to divide those impressions (generated by the users) by approximately 12. In doing that, the numbers would suggest that only their Android app and iPad app are delivering a rich experience where the user is most engaged generating 9 to 6 impressions per visit respectively. The others fall well short of this and their mobile internet site alarmingly so.
m.guardian**
A dedicated mobile site giving users access to guardiannews.comcontent any time and from any device. It is optimised for mobile screen sizes and connection speeds.
Traffic:
2.5 million monthly unique browsers
6.2 million monthly page views
m.guardian is showing incredible growth and almost doubled its traffic over the course of 2011 – growth that is outstripping total growth of the mobile internet market (+25% yr on yr).
Users are accessing a broad range of content through m.guardian with the top five most visited sections being world news, football, sport, technology and Comment is free. Comment is free alone delivers over 250,000 page views per month – an indication that users are valuable opinion leaders.
iPhone app
An award winning iPhone app featuring video, live blogs and more that is available free to users in the US.
Traffic:
34,000 monthly unique browsers
1 million monthly page views
With steady growth in unique browsers of almost 50% over the last four months, the iPhone app is another strong performer in GNM’s mobile portfolio. What’s more, the proportion of heavy users is high at just over 50%. That, combined with a strong frequency metric for user behaviour, indicates a very loyal and engaged audience.
In addition to the regular news content, users have a strong preference for football, sport and business content.
iPad app
We launched our critically acclaimed iPad app in October 2011 and since then it has been downloaded more than 500,000 times (globally). With a clean, modern design and easy navigation the Guardian iPad app is immensely readable.
Traffic:
45,113 monthly unique browsers
3.45 million monthly page views
Android App
Free to download and available from the Android market worldwide it contains the latest news, sport, comment, reviews, videos, podcasts and picture galleries from the Guardian website.
Traffic:
11,000 monthly unique browsers
1.2 million monthly page views
The app delivers a globally minded audience of opinion leaders and the most popular sections include football, Comment is free and world news.
Furthermore, over one in three are heavy users and this has steadily increased over the last few months – an indication that user loyalty and engagement is growing.
SOURCE**: Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/advertising/mobile?newsfeed=true)
One tablet generates as many website visits as four smartphones
Posted: May 16, 2012 in Industry News, Information communications technology, Internet, Mediation Platforms, Mobile Internet, Mobile Platforms, Mobile Technology, Smartphones, Tablets, Technology, Wireless TechnologiesTags: Android, digital index, index report, Mobile, penetration rate, Technology
My Comments on the below:
It is becoming harder and harder to differentiate between a smartphone and tablet. However, there are two distinctive behaviours that will not change. Browsing the internet ‘at home’ and ‘on the go’. There is a certain size tablet that will mainly stay at home for the internet browsing as described in the article such as an iPad or other earlier tablet devices. In parallel, the newer smaller devices such as Galaxy Note that blur the line between smartphone and tablet lean towards being a device that access information ‘on the go’ and equally ‘at home’. The key difference is they are delivering a larger visual experience ‘on the go’ and a larger enough experience to access the internet ‘at home’ that could be considered richer than traditional smartphones. Maybe we should call them internetphones 
Posted By } David Moth
One tablet generates as many website visits as four smartphones, according to data from Adobe’s Digital Index Report.
By the end of Q1 2012 smartphones accounted for 6.1% of site visits compared to 4.3% on tablet.
However, smartphones only maintain a greater share of website visits due to the lower penetration rate of tablets.
The report highlights that from 2010 through to 2011 there were 5.3 times more smartphones shipped across North America and Western Europe compared to tablets.
Adobe predicts that at its current rate of growth tablet traffic will surpass smartphone traffic within 12 months.
Within a year of its launch in Q2 2010 the iPad accounted for 1% of total website visits, reaching 4.3% of total visits by the end of 2011.
In contrast, within the first two years of the iPhone market entry, smartphones accounted for 0.4% of total website visits, taking nearly three years to reach 1% of total visits.
If this trend continues then tablets will account for more than 10% of website visits in 2014.
But Adobe’s report isn’t the first piece of research to highlight the growing popularity of tablets.
A recent survey by InMobi and Mobext found that 69% of tablet owners make a purchase on their device every month.
This highlights the fact that e-tailers need to have a tablet strategy in place.
Our comprehensive blog post, ‘tablets: the opportunity for marketers‘, has a number of tips for how advertisers should seek to target tablet users.
However, we should also be careful not to overstate the importance of tablets, as despite similar levels of engagement PCs drive disproportionately more website visits than tablets.
Adobe’s report shows across North America and Western Europe there were six times more PCs shipped than tablets in between 2009 and 2011.
Yet in Q1 2012 PCs accounted for 19 times more website visits.
The reasons for this are fairly obvious – people use PCs all day at work, and most tablet owners will also use a PC for browsing at home.
Adobe report also appears to fail to take into account the millions of PCs in existence before 2009.
Finally, the data shows that tablet users are more likely to use their device to visit certain types of websites.
For example, consumers consider tablets and PCs to be nearly interchangeable for media consumption and for repeated interactions with financial service providers.
“This suggests that consumers consider tablets to be similar to PCs for visits that are repeated, routine, involve passive consumption of content, and so on.”
However, PC conversion rates are much higher than tablet for retail and travel sites, “suggesting that consumers prefer PCs for visits involving research, comparison of alternatives, and online purchasing.”
Adobe’s Digital Index Report presents findings from an analysis of 23bn visits made to more than 325 mobile and traditional brand websites from January to March of 2010, 2011 and 2012.
Google Seeks Billions by Boosting Mobile Internet Speeds
Posted: April 19, 2012 in Industry News, Information communications technology, Internet, M-Commerce, Mobile Industry News, Mobile Internet, Mobile Technology, Retail, TelecommunicationsTags: google inc, Microsoft, Mobile, mobile phone users, monitoring internet access, Technology, Trevor Healy
Posted By } Olga Kharif
Google is tweaking its mobile browser and working with other companies on changing the way basic Internet technologies work. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg
Like many users of mobile devices, Arvind Jain is annoyed by how long it takes Web pages to load over cellular connections.
The Google Inc. (GOOG) (GOOG) engineering director is continually monitoring Internet-access rates — from hotels, offices and airport lounges around the world — looking for ways to speed things up. Jain’s mission: get websites to load over mobile- phone networks twice as quickly as they do now. Today’s times are typically 9.2 seconds in the U.S.
The goal is part of a companywide initiative for Google, the world’s biggest search-engine provider, which aims to use faster mobile Internet access to unlock billions of dollars in additional e-commerce and online advertising. When people are waiting for pages to load, they aren’t shopping or viewing ads. That’s hampering everyone from giant Internet companies to local businesses trying to reach customers.
“There’s a clear correlation between speed and the success of your online business,” Jain said.
What makes a mobile Web connection slow? In some cases, it’s the carriers’ network — say, if users can’t get 3G or 4G service on their phones. Often, though, it’s because the Web page wasn’t designed to load quickly on a wireless device. The site may have high-resolution pictures or data-intensive effects. Beyond that, Internet protocols and software aren’t always optimized for mobile connections, which can lose some of the data they transmit.
Website Abandonment
An especially long delay can cause consumers to give up on purchases altogether, and the risk is more acute on mobile phones than with desktop computers. Twice as many mobile-phone users abandon a website for reasons such as sluggishness than their desktop counterparts, according to Forrester Research Inc. (FORR) (FORR)That results in lost revenue for online sellers, as well as companies like Google, the U.S. leader in mobile advertising.
To fix the problem, Google is tweaking its mobile browser and working with other companies on changing the way basic Internet technologies work. It’s also rolling out tools that help website owners see the connection between their sites’ performance and sales. That can prod businesses to spend the money needed to speed up their services.
Faster mobile Web loads could increase mobile-commerce sales in the U.S. by 10 percent, or about $600 million a year, said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester. They also could help online commerce in general: Almost half of mobile users are unlikely to return to a website at all if they had trouble accessing it from their phone, a 2011 study by Equation Research found.
Hurting Business
“There’s a big business impact to these kind of struggles,” said Geoff Galat, vice president of worldwide marketing at Tealeaf Technology Inc., a provider of website- improvement software.
Faster mobile Web speeds also translate into additional mobile-ad revenue. A 30 percent improvement in mobile Internet’s speed could lead to a 15 percent rise in ad sales, said Trevor Healy, chief executive officer of mobile-ad provider Amobee Inc. U.S. mobile-advertising spending will reach $2.61 billion this year, up from $1.45 billion in 2011, according to EMarketer Inc.
While carriers adopting 4G networks have helped speed up the mobile Internet, those upgrades won’t have the biggest impact on performance, said Craig Mathias, founder of consulting firm Farpoint Group in Ashland, Massachusetts. Improvements to servers, browsers and other Internet software are even more important, he said.
Catching up to Desktops
Google has plenty of company in trying to accelerate mobile connections. Akamai Technologies Inc. (AKAM) (AKAM), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) (MSFT), Mozilla and a slew of startups are all focused on optimizing Web performance.
The effort could be help mobile speeds catch up with desktop rates by 2014, said Lelah Manz, chief strategist for e- commerce at Akamai. For now, wired users are far ahead. They haven’t had to deal with nine-second downloads since at least 2001, according to Akamai.
“Mobile has to catch up,” Manz said. “Your shoppers are more distracted on a mobile device, and the performance is more important. This realization has just started to hit in the last six to nine months.”
To get there, Google has been tweaking its Chrome Web browser for Android, the most popular smartphone operating system. The software will rely more heavily on artificial intelligence in predicting what Web address someone wants to visit — and then start loading the page while the user is still typing. That feature is currently available in a beta-test form, Jain said.
Web Protocols
Google also is pushing for revisions to Internet protocols, the decades-old rules that govern the way the Web functions. The changes would better handle the quirks of modern mobile networks, such as their propensity to occasionally lose data en route. A revision called TCP PRR, for example, will deploy a new algorithm that accounts for data losses and network congestion.
Another adjustment, called TCP Fast Open, will eliminate the need to synchronize the phone and the server before transmitting the data. Once the revision is adopted, synchronization will happen at the same time as the transfer of data from a website.
Google recently updated its Google Analytics feature to let Web publishers overlay the speed of their site with business measurements, such as revenue per day. That helps them see the correlation and figure out return on investment.
Akamai, meanwhile, is working with Ericsson AB (ERICB), the world’s largest maker of wireless networks, to develop special technology that carriers can use to provide priority Web access to users of retail websites, Manz said. The technology will become available in the U.S. in 2013, she said.
Fewer Requests
In March, Akamai released the Aqua Mobile Accelerator, a technology that sends multiple packets over the mobile network at the same time, cutting down on the number of repeat requests.
Startups are plunging into mobile Web optimization as well. For the past two months, CloudFlare Inc. has been testing a feature called Polish, which automatically goes through images on websites and ensures they are compressed correctly. Mobile- app maker Onavo Mobile Ltd., makes sure images only load when users scroll down to the part of the Web page where the pictures would be visible.
For retailers, such technical advances can’t come soon enough. Said Jonathan Johnson, president of retailer Overstock.com Inc., a Web discounter based in Salt Lake City: “The longer purchasers have to wait, the more frustrated they get, and the more likely they are to leave the site.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Olga Kharif in Portland, Oregon, at okharif@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Thomas Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
Understanding Mobile Advertising
Posted: April 19, 2012 in Ad Industry, Advertising, Digital Display Advertising, Mobile Advertising, Online AdvertisingTags: AdWhirl, Apple, Clickthrough rate, Cost per mille, CTR, eCPM, iOS, iTunes, Pay per click
My Comments:
A nice article summing up the basics of mobile advertising. I would point out that another Key Metric is Conversion i.e what happens after the click: download a piece of content, register to a service, make a transaction etc etc.
Posted By } David Hillis (@davidhillis)
So you have built your mobile website or app and now you want to monetize it. You have a few options: you can sell apps on iTunes or other stores, charge a subscription or paywall, or make your content free and subsidize it with advertising.
The best approach will be determined by your audience, the value of your content or service and your distribution model.
If you are looking to grow your user base substantially, advertising is one of the only effective approaches. By some estimates an app distributed for free will have 10 times more downloads compared with a paid application.
With the growth in smartphones, mobile sites and apps, mobile has become the fastest growing category in advertising. According to eMarketer, mobile advertising spending in the US will grow 80 percent to over US$ 2.6 billion in 2012. And many experts expect mobile advertising to exceed desktop web advertising in the next few years. Whether you are a developer, a publisher or marketer, mobile advertising is a hot topic.
Yet, despite the increased spending in mobile advertising, publishers and advertisers alike are challenged with understanding the key metrics in mobile advertising, as well as finding a reliable way to forecast mobile advertising revenues and ROI.
The opportunity for mobile advertising far exceeds display ads. From location-based services, to bluecasting, to video, to interstitial web pages, there are many ways to create sponsorship. But for most sites and apps, mobile advertising is still focused on display ads. When using display or banner advertising, there are a few key metrics that provide the foundation for nearly any mobile advertising campaign.
Key Mobile Ad Metrics
eCPM
The estimated cost-per-thousand (or Roman number M) is the key metric in mobile advertising. This is the amount that a publisher is paid on average per 1,000 impressions.
For publishers, bulk mobile eCPMs range on average between US$ 1.25 per thousand impressions to as little as US$ .25 per thousand. On the desktop web, advertising is usually sold by either CPM or PPC (pay-per-click). In PPC, also called CPC (cost-per-click), the publisher only gets paid when a user clicks on an ad.
Mobile advertising differs from the desktop Internet in that some networks, like Apple’s popular iAd program, provide a blended model that provides a minimum CPM rate as well as an incremental PPC fee. Of course Google is still one of the major advertising players in mobile and, as with desktop advertising, heavily slants towards PPC.
Regardless of whether you use CPM, PPC or a blended model, forecasting will still use CPM units with an assumed click-thru rate (CTR), which is why the “e” for estimated has been appended to the CPM metric.
CTR
The click-thru rate, or conversion rate, is how often a user actually clicks on an advertisement compared with how often an ad is shown. If an ad is clicked on one time per one hundred impressions, the CTR is one percent.
Impressions
Each time an ad is displayed it creates an impression. How a site or application is created and which ad network or server is utilized will impact the number of impressions.
Refresh Rate
Refresh rates are how often a new ad is loaded.
Many mobile ad networks have a refresh rate of 30 seconds. Thus, a two minute session on a mobile application will generate four impressions. However for Apple iAD the refresh rate is every three minutes, which would result in only one impression within a two minute session. Moreover, some ad services will create a new impression for every page view on a mobile website.
When forecasting your impressions you need to know the ad refresh rate, the average duration of an app session per user, and if page views and/or duration are used to create impressions. You also need to determine which refresh rate will create the most click-through rates for your ads.
Fill Rate
The fill rate is how often an ad is delivered compared to how many times it is requested.
Mobile usage far exceeds the amount of available paid advertising, and fill rates for mobile websites and applications are notoriously low. Although fill rates vary between networks, Apple iAD often only delivers a 25 percent fill rate, or in other words only one ad delivered per four requests. Other networks boast higher fill rates, but often with substantially lower CPMs.
Ideally, publishers will utilize multiple ad networks to fill 100 percent of the inventory. This may be supported through client-side script in the site or app, or by using a mobile ad server, such as AdWhirl, that can broker the ad requests.
Ad Units
The ad unit refers to the dimensions of the mobile ad.
Ad unit standards are in a bit of flux, complicated by the sheer number of handsets and screen sizes on the market. But the most popular smartphone banner size is 300 x 50 pixels.
The Mobile Marketing Association advocates the following ad units.
Full-Feature and Smartphone Standard Ad Units:
- 120×20
- 168×28
- 216×36
- 300×250 (Smartphones Only)
- 300×50 (Smartphones Only)
- 320×50 (Smartphones Only)
Tablet Standard Ad Units:
- 300×250
- 468×60
- 728×90
- 1024×90
Category
The subject of the app or mobile site is referred to as the “category.”
Some categories have much higher eCPMs compared to other categories. When purchasing mobile advertising you need to think about which categories you want to support based on the positioning and relevancy of your product or service.
Publishers need to understand that the topic of the app or site will dramatically affect the rate that advertisers will pay to place ads. For instance, according to a recent report published by Velti, the weather category averages over twice the eCPM of games.
Platform
The platform is the type of device that the mobile ad is delivered on.
Platform can impact the eCPM earned for ads as well as the ad units required to deliver those ads. The most popular platform is Apple iOS, accounting for over 50 percent of all mobile ad impressions and often generating the highest eCPMs for mobile ads.
Forecasting Mobile Ad Revenue for Publishers
As a mobile web or app publisher it can be challenging to forecast mobile ad revenue, especially if you are using multiple ad networks to fill the available advertising inventory, and if those networks use a CPM or PPC model. To make an accurate forecast you need to make some broad assumptions.
The first item to forecast is how many impressions you think you can generate. This will be calculated by:
- The number of times per month people will use your mobile site or app
- The average duration of each session of usage for your mobile site or app
- The refresh rate for how often the ads are loaded with the app or web page
Once you understand how many impressions you can generate, you need to calculate the eCPM rate for each thousand impressions. This will be impacted by:
- The category of your app or website
- The click-thru rate for ads on your app or site
- The platform(s) your app or site are delivered on
Lastly you need to calculate the fill rate for how much of the available ad inventory will be filled by an ad network. Assuming you are using multiple networks to increase your fill rate, you need to determine which percentage of requests will be filled by which network, and at which rates.
Conclusion
Mobile is the future of advertising. It delivers location, context, behavior and other dimensions that promise to make advertising more relevant for end users and more profitable for publishers.
Yet today mobile advertising is in a bit of a freefall, with mobile usage growing faster than available advertising, resulting in falling eCPM rates. On the other side, the growth of mobile is creating more impressions, which equates to more revenue for publishers. Deciding if mobile advertising fits your business requires building a strong forecast model and then testing those assumptions as you go to market.
Whatever direction you take, the one thing you can count on is that it will all change tomorrow. The mobile industry is evolving at such a fast pace that any advertising program will need to be readdressed on a near continual basis.
Feel free to share your thoughts and questions on mobile advertising in the comments below.
Via: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/understanding-mobile-advertising-015180.php
EU cookie law: UK government crumbles?
Posted: March 27, 2012 in Data Privacy, Government and Public Sector, Industry News, Web AnalyticsTags: Directive (European Union), EC Directive, GDS, Government of the United Kingdom, HTTP cookie, ICO, Privacy, Website
With just over a month until the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011 is enforced, it was high time that an organisation with the weight to set a precedent got off the fence and took a serious position on the matter.
Who better than the UK’s Government Digital Service?
I’m not sure I expected the UK government to be the one to lead the charge on cookie law compliance, and I’m certain I didn’t expect them to be the ones to argue that web analytics are “essential”, but that’s exactly what they’ve done with their snappily titled Implementer Guide to Privacy & Electronic Communications Regulations (PECRs) for public sector websites.
So does it stand up to scrutiny? And more pressingly, does it get the rest of us out of a potentially difficult situation?
The government’s argument
The Government Digital Service (GDS) takes the view that web analytics are “essential to the effective operation of government websites” and that “at present the setting of cookies is the most effective way of doing this”.
Further, they feel that web analytics cookies are “minimally intrusive” and that “their usage tends to be controlled by the first-party” (emphasis theirs).
Finally they point to a statement in the Information Commissioner’s Guidance on the rules on the use of cookies and similar technologies which would appear to seal the deal:
Provided clear information is given about their activities we are unlikely to prioritise first-party cookies used only for analytical purposes in any consideration of regulatory action.
Does it stack up?
The title of the GDS’s blog post, It’s not about cookies, it’s about privacy, echoes sentiments expressed in my own recent article on privacy and the cookie law for the LBi bigmouthmedia blog: Joe Public does not, on the whole, have a firm grasp of online privacy, and we don’t have to look very hard to see stark contradictions between popular belief and patterns of behaviour.
So getting hung up on the technology isn’t the point; we must instead concern ourselves with the end result.
Still, laudable as it is, the GDS’s concern for the spirit rather than the letter of the law doesn’t stop them from protecting their own priorities, relying largely on the ICO’s statement that they’re “unlikely to prioritise first-party cookies used only for analytical purposes in any consideration of regulatory action” to justify doing little to change their current analytics implementations.
Like private sector website owners, they’re not terribly keen on obtaining informed consent, either, calling it “disruptive to the user experience”, by which they mean, of course, that practically nobody will consent.
They’re not explicit about how they’ll address this problem, but they will apparently seek to “raise the awareness levels amongst users of government websites about the uses and functions of cookies”.
The other sticking point is that elsewhere in the quoted Guidance document, the ICO advises that analytics cookies are “unlikely to fall within the exception” and defines “the exception” as applying only to cookies which are “for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication” or which are “strictly necessary” (as distinguished from “reasonably necessary”).
In other words it could go either way and, like many organisations considering their cookie options, the GDS seems set to take a gamble that the ICO won’t crack down on analytics.
That’s not a position I’d have expected the government to take and, as an ex-local government officer myself, I have some sympathy with whichever poor soul had to write the risk assessments.
Of course, one could take a view that their aims of assuring the “best possible user experience” and encouraging “citizens to use more cost-effective channels for accessing government services” means that what’s good for them is good for their users, but that seems like the thin end of a wedge and an argument that would be unlikely to cut much ice with the ICO were a private company to be the first to make it.
