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There has been overall improvement across key engagement metrics in mobile display advertising, including ad expansion rate, ad engagement rate and time spent, which can be attributed to seasonality, better quality of creatives as well as a maturing buying ecosystem with improved targeting, according to Celtra’s Mobile Display Ad Performance Report for the second quarter.
Standard ad format type represents 98 percent of all requested impressions in the second quarter, while 11 percent of all impressions were requested for tablet devices.
Ads placed within apps witness higher expansion rates and time spent on ad unit than ads published in Web browsers, and due to the convenience of screen size, tablet devices witness higher video play and video completion rates, the report found.
“The mobile advertising industry needs to adequately demonstrate the value mobile ads can deliver to marketers and prove that mobile channel can be more effective and efficient that TV,” Matevz Klanjsek, Celtra’s co-founder and chief product officer, told eWEEK. “We need to start with identifying and developing the right measurement apparatus and in this past year we’ve seen some significant progress on that front.”
Unit engagement rates and video completion rates are higher on the Google Android platform than on Apple iOS for all format types.
The entertainment vertical received the most requested impressions this quarter (20 percent), while automotive, CPG, food & beverage, retail and technology all received a similar share of impressions (around one-tenth of all quarterly requested impressions).
The technology vertical yielded the highest ad expansion rate this quarter with 0.79 percent, while CPG and entertainment witnessed the highest unit engagement rates.
The longest time spent on ad unit and the highest video play rates were seen in automotive and technology verticals, while the highest video completion rates were witnessed in entertainment and travel verticals.
Now being calculated from potentially viewable core impressions, ad expansion rate in the second quarter is consistently higher across the board—20 percent higher for standard ad format (0.51 percent in the first quarter and 0.61 percent in quarter two).
Newly included in the report, smart video ad formats are proving to be extremely effective, over-performing in both ad unit engagement rate and time users spend on ad unit.
Smart video ad formats represent the latest in mobile video ad technology, providing the most scalable, cross-screen, in-banner video ad experience with the widest reach.
The smart video ad format also showed a relatively high ad expansion rate of 0.73 percent, with many smart video format ads utilizing in-banner video, which appears to be a feature that convinces the users to tap.
The time on ad unit is the longest in smart video format ads (25.4 seconds), while on standard expandable banners it is 16.5 seconds, which is more than 5 seconds longer than in the first quarter (11.1 seconds).
“In the past few years, the ad tech industry has developed tools and platforms that successfully leverage big data and enable advertisers to target and buy audience intelligently,” Klanjsek said. “At the same time, most of the display ads have remained simple static digital billboards. Now it’s time to make them truly smart.”
He explained this means that ads will be fully aware of the advertising context and will be able to adapt to it.
Such ads would be aware of the audience they are being shown to, publisher context in which they are displayed and various general signals such as time and location.
They would also have the ability to dynamically react to such signals and eventually become fully customized and even personalized branded experiences that can communicate with consumers much more effectively and allow advertisers to run successful display campaigns much more efficiently.