by Heidi Schwende, Featured Contributor
WERE YOU AWARE that time spent on a mobile device increased over 270% in four years? Well it’s absolutely true. eMarketer research has monitored growth rates for mobile and the results are astounding.
Here are some of the absolutely incredible statistics for last year, yes LAST year:
Global mobile subscriptions: 6,587.4 million [Informa, 6/13]- 1,492 billion global smartphone subscribers, which is 21% penetration of total mobile subscribers; in the U.S., penetration is 58% [Mary Meeker, KPCB 5/12 ]
- Mobile traffic as a percentage of global Internet traffic is projected to hit 25% by December of 2014. Note, this is HUGE! [Mary Meeker, KPCB 5/12 ]
- 21.8% of total Black Friday 2013 online sales were via mobile — tablets accounting for 14.4% and smartphones 7.2% of the online sales respectively — [TechCrunch, 11/13 ]
And just to give you an idea of what’s happening in 2014 here’s what the MMA’s UK Chairman has recently said about mobile marketing for this year:
2014 is The Year of Big Winners and Big Losers
1. 2014 is the year of the Tablet. In 2014 consumers’ time spent and the activities they conduct on tablets will broaden, creating strong opportunities for brand and performance advertisers.
2. In 2014, brands get serious about mobile gaming. Mobile gaming is already bigger than social media with 70% of the time spent on tablets and 30% of the time spent on mobile**. Arguably playing games on mobile is one of the largest media events to happen to consumers since the TV arrived in homes. Brands will start to take advantage.
3. Mobile advertising becomes social. Advertising has always been content that must inform or entertain, now it must also be good enough to be shared or liked.
4. Mobile ad spend doubles, AGAIN. In markets of exponential growth all the disruption happens late in the market development e.g. as 20% of digital ad spend is set to double to 40% of digital ad spend. 2014 will see one of the most transformative years with big winners and big losers.
Sources – *ComScore, **Flurry”
Why then are 93% of all websites still not optimized for mobile devices?
Yet in spite of all the statistics, 93% of all websites are still not optimized for mobile. And although it is estimated that 70 per cent of companies are learning to do mobile they aren’t doing it well enough, aren’t building for mobile devices fast enough. The market is ready, yet companies are still stuck in that entry phase.
Avinash Kaushik, the author of Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics: An hour a Day, and Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google says ” never let social media write checks that your website can’t cash”. So the same holds true for Mobile. Never let your mobile marketing write checks that your website can’t cash.”
And why aren’t agencies and publishers able to calculate it’s ROI?
In a survey commissioned by Nielsen and conducted by Digiday in October 2013 surveyed attitudes and approaches to mobile advertising it is stated very clearly that we’ve reached a tipping point in mobile brand advertising. The tools and solutions that can help address the confusion with mobile metrics are being developed or already exist.
Yet, 97% of advertisers say it’s important to calculate ROI and only 1/3 of agencies and publishers are actually calculating ROI at the end of every campaign. This isn’t surprising given the metrics that publishers use to calculate ROI are more suited to direct response objectives and are not the brand lift metrics that advertisers are looking for.
The survey stated that “in our opinion, the easiest way to accomplish alignment on all campaign goals is to invest in systems that allow everyone involved in the campaign to view and directly collaborate around performance. In my opinion if your agency cannot provide this for you, you should be looking for a new agency pronto!
So the bottom line here is this, get your site mobile as soon as possible, make sure your social strategy is firmly in place and engage with an agency you can provide you real-time, 24-7 access to a reporting system that will provide you with the ROI information you need.
