Mobile advertising has high click-through rate, but fails to hold attention

Mobile analytics firm Amethon has released results from a study into mobile advertising sites. The study, which focused on sites that exist only to host a specific advertising campaign, found that while click-through-rates may be high, the sites don’t hold browsers attention, and the majority of viewers don’t even get past the first page.

Amethon studied the traffic of over 100 mobile campaign sites - here are the key findings from its Mobile Internet Insight Report in brief:

- On average, consumers view 1.53 pages when visiting a mobile ad site
- Best-in-class sites can push that up to 3 pages per visit
- Only 33% of consumers make it past the first page
- Movie campaign sites performed the best, averaging 1.65 page views and attracting 21% of the audience
- Alcohol campaigns came second, with the same % share of the audience, but much poorer page views (a lot of consumers don’t go past the age verification page)
- Despite being the most numerous kind of site, Mobile Services ad sites have a low audience share and an average of 1.35 page views per visit
- Content downloads like branded wallpapers or videos don’t improve engagement much.

From the release:

“Mobile Advertising is enjoying a reputation for exceptionally high click through rates compared to its web counterpart, but until now not much has been known about what happens ‘after the click through’ from a banner ad or SMS,” said James Cleary, CTO of Amethon. “We believe that in order to leverage the potential of mobile advertising, brands and their providers can gain much from understanding behaviour once a consumer lands on the microsite. This helps them focus on tangible campaign goals like competitions entry, content download and viewing key pages, rather than only click-throughs. The key differences between Mobile Analytics and traditional web analytics solutions include optimised measurement of mobile web activity, ability to track inbound campaign sources such as SMS and banner ads, and measure key conversion events such as a ringtone or video downloads.”

What we think?

There are some interesting results there, and some that aren’t so surprising. I can see why age verification pages are a problem, and content downloads aren’t so hot. The average page view count is incredibly low because people tend not to spend a huge amount of time on the mobile web - especially when speeds are still slow. If you’ve just waited 60 seconds to access a campaign site and the first thing you see is an age verification page that will eat at least another minute of your time, you might be tempted to just log out. The same goes for content downloads - those things take time. Not just that, but people are still wary of mobile data usage.