At the Mobile Advertising & Marketing Awards conference Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango, explored the revenue streams that are made possible through off-portal mobile Web surfing. What is off-portal? It means that a brand, merchant or service provider wants to communicate directly with the consumer without anything (like those pesky operators) getting in the way. For off-portal site maintainers, it is challenging both to raise consumer awareness of your site, and to generate enough revenue to make it worthwhile.
Ray didn’t dwell too long on the problem of advertising your site without on-portal support. He touched briefly on the more popular methods – QR codes are big in Japan, as they allow you to advertise your mobile site through traditional print / billboard media. Push SMS is another way. TV, print, community/viral, mobile search, direct url, websites – all are possible. However, the meat of his presentation concerned the three main ways an off-portal site can create revenue
Method 1 – selling content:
Assuming you’ve gotten a marketing campaign to draw people to your site, somewhere along the way you’ll want them to pay for something. You’ve (presumably) paid good money to attract users to your site. Now you need to convert those hits into sales.
The most important aspect of this model is your Conversion Rate. In the most simple terms, this represents the number of people who want to purchase that actually complete a transaction. Ideally, you want to convert 100% of willing customers into actual money in the bank. There are two main reasons that customers might fail to convert: 1) they change they’re mind half way through. This most often happens because the price is too high, or because of an “operator prices might apply” notice. 2) they try to pay but payment fails. This can be because they don’t have enough credits, or they’re asked to take an action they can’t perform right now – like finishing the transaction on a computer.
So, if your price is right and your CR is high, the next most important area is targeting. You want to attract the right kind of people to your site, ie. people who can get to your site easily and complete payment for your product. So, you have to carefully track your marketing campaigns. Backtracking your sales is critical. Once a number of sales have been made, you have to see what kind of marketing campaign pulled those sales in. This allows you to focus on the marketing techniques that are helping you reach your target audience. If you don’t do this, you’re likely wasting money on unneeded advertising.
Another thing to bear in mind is that branding has an effect on CR. If the content provider is a recognisable brand, CR tends to be higher. If there is recognisable branding on the payment pages, CR tends to be higher. High prices almost always lead to bad conversion.
Method 2: ad-funding
If you have a site that generates high traffic, ad funding will seem attractive. Once ads are on your site, any time one of your visitors clicks on those ads (or drives revenue to the advertised site) you share some of the revenue. This method isn’t without its challenges either. The ad-funding market is very tight, and content providers can sometimes find they get no revenue from ad funding. Another problem, which ESPN found, was that random, irrelevant ads were popping up on its site – so it was forced had to bring advertising back in-house. This problem is lessened if you go through people like AdMob or Buzzcity, who place inventory from several different networks and can do better targeting.
Method 3: mobile search
Putting mobile search advertising on your mobile site can draw in good revenue, but it works best for high traffic sites. If you have a service like AdWords on your site, you’ll collect 20-40% of ad search spend. But the big problem here is that this method almost guarantees people will be leaving your site. This is really a game for high traffic sites that don’t mind “leavers”.
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