Persistence and experimentation are key to mobile advertising

I'm so focused on mobile advertisingthat I sometimes miss digital marketing techniques – unless they're actually in use by a mobile marketer, they tend to swing into my field of view. Well, today an ad technology company calledTapAd, which is focused on mobile, introduced me to something I hadn't encountered in mobile before: retargeting.

What's retargeting?

Retargeting is, quite simply, the art of being persistent. The idea behind it is that vast majority of people (in excess of 98%) who are served an ad impression do not take any action based on it. Perhaps the ad is designed to get you to sign up to a new service, or fill out a survey, or subscribe to a mailing list… or any other action an advertiser might want you to take. A small number of people will take action, but most just pass along. What retargeters ask is "why only try once?" So they specifically retarget those people with a different style of on-line advertising. It kind of reminds me of hunting – if track a target, you stand a better chance of scoring a hit.

Where does TapAd come into it?

The problem with retargetting is that it needs to know what a consumers past behaviour has been – that way, it will know what hasn't worked so far and it can try something new. So, on-line it works mainly around cookies, but cookies really don't work all that well on mobile. Each mobile device handles them a little differently, so it's very hard for advertisers to use them reliably. So TapAd has expanded the range of methods it uses to track a user – including cookies, but also HTML5 databases and tracking pixels.

TapAd claims to already by running campaigns for "at least" 8 brands, purchasing 8 – 10 million impressions per month; both on mobile web and apps.

What we think?

I can only imagine that this kind of thing could be pretty aggravating for a consumer – how many times do you have to ignore something before it goes away? But for an advertiser, it could lead down some very interesting paths. Imagine a mobile marketing campaign that can connect to every available mobile channel: SMS, web display, app display, audio ads, rich media, location, coupons, etc. Something like TapAd could automatically experiment with these various ad formats, to see which is best suited to a particular consumer. And I'm not talking about spam here – if the TapAd system really can remember your mobile usage history, it could reach through non-invasive channels, but also through invasive channels that you've opted in to.

http://www.gomonews.com/persistence-and-experimentation-are-key-to-mobile-advertising/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GomoNews+%28GoMo+News%29

http://www.gomonews.com/author/cian/