Mobile marketing and m-commerce

Mobile advertising is becoming increasingly popular among businesses as it can reach a large audience in a concise, economic format and achieve a higher conversion rate than display advertising. Read more about m-commerce and mobile marketing benefits.

Mobile advertising formats

There are a number of different ways you can advertise on mobile devices, including:

• search engine pay-per-click ads  have mobile friendly features such as  'click to call' a telephone number in the ad
• on mobile friendly video websites such as YouTube
• on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter
• in-app advertising

• SMS and MMS

Some online advertising platforms allow you to specifically target mobile users. 

Using mobile advertising

Before starting any advertising campaign, you need to consider:

• your target audience
• what you want to achieve from the campaign
• how it sits within your overall marketing mix

You also need to create a brief for your advertising campaign, and consider the following points:

• what you are trying to communicate
• your time and budget restraints
• whether you will create and manage the campaign in-house or outsource
• whether your advert is to be a one-off or a series
• what you will be measuring, eg key performance indicators

Measuring mobile advertising success

You can only measure your advertising success and learn lessons for future campaigns if you set clear, quantifiable objectives at the start of your campaign. Many good web statistics packages allow you to segment and analyse mobile content.

Measures of a successful campaign include:

• click through rates - the percentage of users who click on an advert to go to the advertiser's site
• pages visited and dwell time - the pages in your site visitors look at and how long they spent on each page
• whether anything was purchased or ordered after visiting the site through an advert
• how many times your app has been downloaded - if using a mobile app

Read more about measuring your online marketing.