What is mobile advertising? Everything you need to know

Mobile advertising is one of the most effective forms of advertising on the internet. With mobile users now accounting for the majority of traffic on the internet, reaching your customers wherever they are—and serving them high-quality ads—can transform your digital marketing strategy. Major brands are making mobile ads a huge part of their marketing strategy as global mobile ad spend is expected to rise to more than $495B in 2024.

But what is mobile advertising, why does it work so well, how can you incorporate it into your marketing strategy, and how does Agility use mobile advertising to help your company reach its marketing goals? 

What Is Mobile Advertising? 

Mobile advertising is any form of digital advertising specifically designed to appear on a mobile device, usually a smartphone or tablet. Mobile advertising is a key part of a complete mobile marketing strategy, which can use other channels like social media ads, paid search ads, and more.

Mobile ads, like any advertisement, aim to drive a direct response from the viewer through a call-to-action. Typically, that response is purchasing a product, but mobile ads can be useful for other goals including promoting a webinar or event, growing an email list, or simply spreading awareness.

Types of Mobile Advertising

Your mobile advertising strategy can make use of traditional ad formats including banner ads, pop-ups, and video ads. But formats like interstitial ads (full-screen ads that usually require the viewer to wait to close), pre-and mid-roll video ads, in-app ads, push notifications, and native ads are optimal on mobile devices.

Some of the best mobile ad campaigns go a step further, building an interactive mobile app or experience to draw prospects in.

Deciding which type of mobile ads to use depends on your advertising budget, campaign goals, target customers, call-to-action, and creative resources.

What Are the Benefits of Mobile Advertising? 

Here are five significant benefits of mobile advertising. 

1. Reach Your Audience Wherever They Are – Web traffic used to be dominated by computers, but since 2017 that hasn’t been the case as more people switched to mobile devices. In 2023, 54.67% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. There’s even a growing group that only uses their mobile phones to access the internet. When you use mobile advertising, you can better reach your target audience. 
   
2. Speak Directly to Audience Needs and Pain Points with Segmentation – With mobile advertising, you can segment your market and create targeted advertisements shown only to specific demographics. This allows you to customize messages to speak directly to the needs of each customer, which can increase engagement and conversion rates. 
3. Cost-effective – Mobile marketing is significantly cheaper than traditional marketing techniques, and it has a better ROI. Traditional advertising takes the shotgun approach, where an advertisement is shown to a wide audience in hopes of the right customer viewing it. The main benefit of mobile advertising is that there isn’t as much wasted spend. Targeted mobile advertisements take a sniper approach. Rather than wasting ads on the wrong audience members, mobile advertising tries to reach the perfect customer on the right device at the right time, reducing wasted spend and increasing engagement.
4. Easy to Track – It’s easy to generate reports and evaluate your KPIs. With more information, it’s easier to tweak and polish your campaign to increase click-through rates and conversions by making more accurate and relevant high-quality ads. 
5. Continual Refinement – With mobile advertising, it’s easy to perform A/B testing to test various ad creatives, targeting options, graphics, and CTAs. You can continually optimize an ad, to make the best ad that speaks to your target audience. 

How Is Mobile Advertising Effectiveness Measured? 

Advertisements can help drive revenue growth and improve brand awareness, but how do you know they’re actually doing that? Here are four of the basic metrics you can measure your mobile ad spend performance.

• Click-Through Rate (CTR) – An ad’s CTR is the percentage of people who click on your ad compared to the number of people who see it. A higher CTR is a good indicator your ads are finding the right audience. CTRs can change depending on what you are advertising and the networks you choose to advertise on. Because of this shift, there are no universal ‘best’ or ‘worst’ CTR percentages. 
  
• Cost Per Click (CPC) – This measures how much it costs to earn one click on your ad. A common mistake when measuring CPC is ignoring some costs and fees involved with placing an ad. For example, you should include the cost of placing the ad and all of the costs building up to placing the ad, including any costs for strategy, design, and layout. When you don’t include the full cost associated with the ad, it can significantly drop the CPC and give you inaccurate information. Ideally, your CPC should be low, but you should consider it in context with the revenue it generates from your product or service. For example, a CPC of $10 doesn’t seem high if it leads to a consumer purchasing a car or similar high-ticket item.

• Cost Per Lead (CPL) – This metric measures the cost of generating a quality lead for your sales team from the ad. This is an important metric because when you compare it to your CPC, you can start to identify potential issues in the customer journey. When comparing CPC and CPL rates, the most common situation is when your CPC is very low, and the CPL is very high. This means customers are clicking on your ad, but something is stopping them from converting once on the website. 
• Effective Cost Per Mille (eCPM) - eCPM is a frequently used metric used to measure the effectiveness of advertising. eCPM is calculated by dividing the revenue generated from your campaign by the total number of impressions served, then multiplying by 1000. The result is the amount of revenue generated from every 1000 impressions. If your eCPM is less than your CPM, you might want to rethink your strategy. Intrusive and interactive ads typically cost more than simple ads like banners (have a higher CPM), but their effectiveness is typically higher by several orders of magnitude—a more than 4,000% better eCPM, according to Adnimation.

These metrics help provide some idea of how well your customers are responding to your ads, but they fail to paint the full picture. When a customer sees an ad, they may not immediately click and purchase. In reality, the purchase process is a journey and one ad is only a moment in that journey. With Agility’s precision advertising platform, advertisers can see the true impact their efforts are having on revenue growth.

How To Build Your Mobile Ad Campaign

Mobile ads can be a powerful tool in your advertising strategy, but without proper targeting and planning, they can unnecessarily cost you money. Likewise, if you are not serving high-quality ads, customers won’t remember your brand, let alone click on the ad.

Targeting your ideal customer involves identifying key demographics, user behavior, historical purchases, and geographical location. Without accurate targeting, you’ll be spending money serving ads to consumers who are unlikely to care or take action.

Creating ads that are relevant and resonate with your customers is equally important. Poor resolution, unclear CTAs, and unappealing design will easily lose your customers’ attention. Creating a positive advertising experience is just as important as creating a positive user experience in your product or store.

Make the Most of Your Mobile Ads with Agility

Agility’s precision advertising platform uses multiple data sources to build extremely targeted personas. We then use a curated mix of mobile ads, geofencing, connected TV ads, display ads, and audio ads to reach your target customer wherever they are. Mobile ads make up a key piece of Agility’s strategy, but by employing several channels Agility boosts your advertising effectiveness.

Traditionally, the impact of mobile advertising has been difficult to quantify, but using advanced data science, machine learning, and analytics, Agility can measure the direct response our precision advertising strategy has on your business.

Contact us today to learn more about how you can take advantage of mobile advertising and more.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does mobile advertising work?

Mobile advertising serves relevant ads to consumers’ mobile devices in a variety of ad formats. Mobile advertising, like most advertising efforts, uses various data points tied to user behavior, purchase intent, and demographics to accurately target potential customers.

Which ad format works best on smartphones?

Any ad that is specifically designed for mobile (size requirements, resolution) will work in your mobile ad campaign. More interactive or intrusive ads are usually more efficient but usually cost more as well. Cheaper, less noticeable ads might not prompt as much action but do help to keep your brand top-of-mind. Finding the right mix of ads for your campaign goals is a delicate process. Find out how Agility does it for some of the biggest brands in the world.

How much does mobile advertising cost?

Mobile advertising costs vary depending on the ad format, targeting, and mobile device. For less invasive, common ads like banner advertisements, cost typically ranges from a few cents per thousand impressions to a few dollars, depending on your targeting. For more intrusive ads like interstitial ads, mobile video ads, and in-app ads, costs can be much higher, with prices ranging from less than a dollar to several dollars per thousand impressions. In both cases, mobile ads on Apple devices tend to be more expensive than mobile ads on Android devices.