Google Fine-Tunes Mobile App Advertising, While Others Jump Ship
In October I reported the struggles that Google and Facebook are experiencing with their mobile advertising revenue streams. While there hasn’t been enough time since then to make much difference in their sales numbers, those two and other giants are making big changes going in to 2013.
Simply getting clicks isn’t enough in the mobile world, especially when as many as 40 percent of those clicks are accidents that resulted in an ad being viewed for two seconds; and sometimes Google refuses to “count” those clicks and risks losing many of them due to a new prompt that requires mobile device users to confirm whether they meant to click banner ads or not.
Google’s move is sure to please users who will undoubtedly prefer to opt out of visiting the site they didn’t mean to go to in the first place. But eBay is taking the user experience to a whole new level by removing ads from their mobile applications entirely.
AllThingsD.com recently interviewed eBay’s president of global marketplaces, Devin Wenig, who stated that not only are they aiming to improve their user experience but also that eBay’s previous experiments “didn’t deliver meaningful revenue.” eBay has received an incredibly positive response to their mobile app campaign, and Wenig claimed that even if the ads had been successful “we don’t need the money.” Must be nice!
Facebook, like Google, is hard at work at enhancing their own advertising capabilities for their clients, but, as the current lack of genuine revenue has been shown, they too are ending their own advertising on third party apps.
AdAge recently pointed out that while mobile apps and the devices that run them are an unbelievable resource for collecting data about customers, the challenge continues to be how to monetize that research.
Companies are doing amazing things with big data. 4info has collected data on 330 million devices across 97 million households in the United States, knitting together a road map of demography, geography and behavior that equips advertisers with the quick-strike capability of a U.S. drone.
With the decline of print media evident in the constant shuttering of magazines and newspapers, and as mobile apps become more and more popular, someone will undoubtedly come up with a successful mobile app formula eventually. Companies have done a great job of creating can’t-live-without apps, but that’s nowhere near as challenging as creating mobile ads that generate anywhere near as much interest.
