Marketers Dissatisfied With Mobile Click Based Marketing

Are you investing in mobile marketing?  If so, are you happy with the performance of your mobile ads?  If not, then you are in good company; a new study from the US indicates that many advertisers are becoming disillusioned with their mobile marketing.  

The study was conducted on behalf of Pontiflex, a mobile and internet marketing signup platform that asks users to sign up to mobile and online ads, so has a vested interest in discovering that users and marketers would rather ads require signup than not.  However, bearing that in mind, some of the findings are interesting.  According to the survey (conducted amongst 363 qualified marketing executives in the US), 56% of marketers either do not bother with click-based marketing at all, or are dissatisfied with it.  

Of the marketers not planning to increase their mobile spending this year, 43% said the low return on investment was the main reason they would not be increasing their spend.  According to the research, 41% of respondents said that their most successful mobile ad campaigns were those where they paid for signups (signups being the email addresses or social media names of the users who had explicitly agreed to receive marketing messages from them)

Interestingly, in other research done by Pontiflex, 47% of mobile users (and 61% of 18-34 year olds) admitted they had clicked or tapped on a mobile ad in an application more by accident than on purpose.  

Even allowing for the possible bias in the survey, the replies would suggest taking a closer look at in-app advertising that does not require (or charge marketers for) clicks; it is pretty clear that users prefer ads that do not distract them from their entertainment in other media, so why think it would be different in mobile apps?