Brief:
- Mobile ad campaigns kept growing more effective for consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands last year with improvements in return on advertising spend (ROAS), according to research from 4Info, a mobile marketing data company. ROAS measures incremental sales that can be attributed to advertising.
- Average ROAS surged 30% to $2.82 last year from 2015 for CPG brands that ran mobile ad campaigns, 4Info found. Top-performing campaigns produced an average ROAS of $5.32, the company said based on its study of 248 mobile campaigns among 138 brands.
- Mobile campaigns that include video had 19% higher ROAS than non-video campaigns. Campaigns featuring either a promotion or coupon outperformed other creative formats by as much as 80%. The best-performing categories were baby, over-the-counter medicines and health and beauty, 4Info said.
Insight:
4Info, which has developed a method to track the effect of mobile ads on in-store purchases, highlights several ways that mobile ad campaigns can improve their effectiveness when comparing sales to ad spend. Ad measurement is critical, particularly in the atmosphere of distrust and lack of transparency among marketers, agencies, media platforms and trading desks. Mobile marketers also have to confront a multibillion-dollar fraud problem in the digital ad market and improved ad-blocking features built into mobile operating systems.
The demand for mobile video ad inventory has grown faster than the amount of inventory available as brands clamor to place video ads on mobile platforms. The outsized demand has led to mobile ad prices that are at least twice as much as standard banner ads, 4Info said. Even still, video ads are a cost-effective way to drive sales. CPMs average 25% more for campaigns that include video ad units, but those campaigns outperform non-video campaigns by more than 48%.
Meanwhile, social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, Snap, Pinterest and Google’s YouTube are quickly developing new ad formats to handle mobile video in an effort to capture a greater portion of lucrative TV marketing budgets. Spending on mobile video ads grew 142% in Q2 2017 from the prior quarter, making it the fastest-growing mobile ad format, according to a study this week from mobile ad platform Smaato.
