What’s going on in Mobile Marketing?
2017 has represented, so far, a relevant year for the mobile marketing landscape. Users’ privacy is still a central issue while the amount of mobile ad frauds are increasing. In this context four main topics up for debate arise: the pro and cons of multi-touch attribution model, web vs app usage, the dichotomy between marketing and advertising technology, also known as MarTech and AdTech and the spreading of mobile ad frauds.
Multi-touch attributions: the pro and cons
The Topic
An attribution model is the set of rules that determines how credits for conversions are assigned to touchpoints in conversion paths. Usually, marketers tend to use single attribution models, which assigns all the credit to one event rather than multi-touch ones. Multi-touch or fractional attribution is about how to credit leads across campaigns, meaning it empowers advertisers to define weighted values to different partners based on a set of predefined rules, statistical models or both. It helps to figure out which marketing channel or campaign should be credited with the conversion. But is the advertising industry ready for such a model?
Considerations
Multi-touch model gives marketers additional data on leads which turns in a more precise pictures of the entire marketing funnel, helping in investing and strategic decisions and awarding all the partners for their participation to the process. It also increases the level of transparency in the creation of value. At the same time, it’s quite challenging since customers journey can be difficult to understand, so marketers and partners will never see the whole picture, implying fractional model can go wrong despite help provided by data. Moreover, publisher might not be ready to get paid less and marketers to pay more when dealing with different types of fractional attribution.
Final Thoughts
Shifting from single touch to multi-touch attribution would help to better understand and measure customer journey. But it’s not easy at all, considering it requires a lot of data and a change of publishers and marketers’ approach to the matter as well as the willing to accept risk to be paid less or to pay more.
Web vs App Usage
The Topic
As reported by the latest researches, average users spend 5 hours a day using their mobile devices. People seem to prefer mobile apps rather than mobile web: apps account for more than 90% of people’s non-voice smartphone time while mobile web accounts just for less than 10%. Mobile apps are easily accessible and can be launched faster than mobile web and provide an immersive experience with a greater degree of functionality keeping users more engaged in each session, something that a mobile website cannot rival. So, how to pick the right tool?
Considerations
People’s app usage is driven by routines: they usually tend to use the same five apps so creating loyal app users is not easy at all. This means that, before creating loyalty, people need to be reached and attracted, which is what mobile web is fit to do. Although this increasing time spent on mobile, researches show, on the other hand, a decrease in the overall app usage, meaning a decrease in the average number of apps used by a single person. According to Cathy Boyle– eMarketer principal analyst- “American consumers spend the bulk of their app time conducting five activities: listening to digital audio, social networking, gaming, video viewing and messaging”. In 2016, American smartphone users utilized an average of 21 apps per month; by the end of 2019 this amount is predicted to drop to 20 apps.
Final thoughts
When it comes to mobile web vs mobile apps it’s important to understand that the core matter is to be able to combine customers’ preferences and company’s strategy. It’s all about comprehending how to attract and retain consumers in every stage of the company’s lifecycle. Mobile marketers should continuously strive to identify the right way to attract users, make them know their own products, drive and improve users’ engagement as well as retain the most valuable customers. Clearly, it’s not easy at all and it’s something related more to building the company’s overall business strategy rather than simply picking between two tools. Each stage will require a specific element, marketers’ job is to find it.
The dichotomy between MarTech and AdTech
The Topic
Turning to the dichotomy between Marketing Technology and Advertising Technology, the central matter is if they should be still considered as two separated elements or if increasing convergence is required. For years, people have depicted MarTech and AdTech as disconnected elements claiming the latter is for paid media while the former for owned ones.
Considerations
Actually, the distinction is just about labels, not semantics: AdTech is the technology used to help marketers in managing advertising, so it’s part of the broader concept of MarTech, defined as the set of initiatives, efforts and tools that harness technology to achieve marketing goals. Advertising technology is just one side of the marketing one. This dichotomy is quite dysfunctional since most of the technologies used in advertising are valuable in marketing too, while convergence can help to reduce the complexity in customer journey, both in terms of understanding and measurements, as well as to engage new customers and re-engage the expired ones.
Final thoughts
The final goal should be to create a single and synchronized database for MarTech and AdTech so as to define a user-centric experience across all the channels. Marketing and advertising technology should share the same view of customers segmentation and journey so as to create an internal (martech) and external (adtech) information storage simplifying processes.
Spreading of Mobile Ad Frauds
The Topic
Mobile Ad Fraud, defined as practice of cheating the advertisers by serving ads that have zero chance to be viewed by users, low quality/fake clicks or low quality/fake installs, are quite challenging too. As a matter of fact, the creation of new types of Artificial Intelligence and the lack of a unified fraud detection system determine cuts which allow fraudsters to corrupt the system affecting advertisers’ and legitimate publishers’ businesses. Nowadays, the core question is how to identify and defeat these frauds.
Considerations
Two main solutions can be set but they both require full cooperation between marketers and partners. Full transparency and sharing of data and efforts is one of the possible solutions; being able to identify sources of traffic to be shared between marketers and partners so as to blacklist suspicious publishers can help too. Scrubbing clicks, installs or conversions is another possible solutions; in order to be truly effective the reasons behind each scrub must be transparent, precise and fully shared between marketers and partners otherwise frauds would find breeding ground once again.
Final thoughts
Tie all the marketers’ activities to revenues rather than to metrics, as clicks, impressions or views, might represent a helpful solution, since it’s quite more difficult to adjust revenues, especially in a long term horizon, that adjust variable metrics.
Summing up:
- Industry should shift from a single attribution model to a multi-touch one seeing that it works for better understanding customer journey and allows to reward all the partners depending on their participation. In order to be effective it requires as many data as possible since the customer path is complex and marketers could lose sight of some parts.
- When dealing with Mobile Apps vs Mobile Web it essential to underline that the choice is about client’s’ preferences as well as marketers’ ones. It about making easy for customers to discover marketers’ business, learn about it and choose it. So as for mobile, the central matter is not the choice between mobile apps or mobile web, but the choice of the approach fitting better the brand needs in each stage of their strategic planning.
- MarTech and AdTech should converge, as the latter is just a section of the former. Having a single database of records would help in unraveling the complexity of customers’ journey and behaviours.
- Identifying mobile frauds is quite challenging since fraudulent publishers seem to be able to continuously find new ways to fool the system. But detecting and preventing sharp practices is possible: joint efforts and shared point of view can be a relevant starting point for defeating them. As a matter of fact fighting frauds, and the resulting misrepresentations of the market’s dynamics, requires perfect alignment and full cooperation of the involved players. In this way it will be possible to focus all the common efforts on uncovering the reasons triggering frauds as well as the most effective solutions to defeat them so as to create a stable and growing mobile market.
