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Shares of impressions for banner and interstitial format type ads continue to grow in the mobile advertising space, according to the latest report from Celtra.
Banner impressions now represent over a quarter of all requested impressions, and since the fourth quarter, which includes the holiday shopping season, the retail industry represents more than 20 percent of all quarterly requested impressions.
The report found the performance of banners has doubled this quarter, with the industry witnessing higher unit engagement rate, video play rate and video completion rate.
On interstitials, unit engagement rate has increased too, from 2.5 percent to 3.4 percent, while ad expansion rate for expandable banners remains unchanged at 0.66 percent.
Celtra witnessed a lift in expansion rate in smart video formats by 75 percent, and while unit engagement rate for standard expandable banner impressions has dropped by 35 percent, it has increased by 30 percent on smart video formats.
“Entertainment ads have traditionally been strong performers and they continue to outperform other verticals. This can largely be attributed to the quality of the assets as well as the more interesting nature of the entertainment vertical,” Matevz Klanjsek, co-founder and chief product officer at Celtra, told eWEEK. “In the past quarter, the quality of entertainment and technology ads have further improved with more interactivity and more engaging experiences, often times employing gaming and more sophisticated story-telling elements.”
In addition, auto-play video is taking over, with 75 percent of videos in all Q4 creatives set to auto-play, which have also been included in video completion rate calculations.
The video completion rate was 59 percent in standard expandable banners, and even higher (71 percent) in smart video expandable banners.
Meanwhile, eager shoppers used location-based features, as engagement with location features peaked in Q4 2014 with 25.7 percent.
The top- performing verticals were led by the retail industry–the absolute Q4 winner with 1.06 percent ad expansion rate.
The highest unit engagement rates for expandable banners were in the travel industry (23.9 percent) and technology industry (20.9 percent).
The longest time spent on ad unit was in the food and beverage vertical, while the highest video play rates for user-initiated video were in the automotive and entertainment verticals, both 17.7 percent.
The highest video completion rates were measured in entertainment and technology verticals, both above 70 percent in banner format.
“A major trend that we at Celtra see for mobile display in 2015 will be programmatic creative,” Klanjsek said. “Such display ads will increasingly be leveraging data to power the creatives making every impression customized for specific audience and context. This way, mobile display will be able to offer much more relevant ad experiences that will positively impact the performance.”