Mobile is hot, it’s at the top of every marketers urgent list. So why, according to Forrester research, do brands shy away from investing in mobile advertising?
The same old story: It’s difficult to track performance. It’s hard to gauge ROI. And there’s no “Viagra Mobile.”
Everyone is on a mobile device or two and yet “mobile advertising only accounts for about 5 percent of the average brand’s budget,” says Mike O’Brien in a recent post for ClickZ.
“In a recent report, “Master Mobile Measurement to Unleash True Cross-Channel Advertising”, Forrester research found that most brands shy away from investing too much in mobile because they’re not confident they can measure the success of their campaigns,” O’Brien explains.
Yes, there were some increases. If you’re on mobile, you’ve witnessed it. But not that much.
“Nearly everyone said their mobile ad spend budget increased from last year, but not by much. Though 62 percent of marketers surveyed feel confident about measuring the return on investment (ROI) attributed to mobile ad campaigns, only 18 percent reported feeling “very confident” about their ability to do so. Without hard numbers, many marketers don’t feel comfortable investing heavily in mobile,” says O’Brien.
“This is counter-intuitive since consumers now spend over half of their leisure time on mobile devices,” adds Gal Oppenheimer, senior product manager of built.io, a mobile back-end and application development platform for software company raw engineering. “Mobile advertising is clearly important, but it needs to get easier to track brand awareness and consumer spending.”
True, no cookies. Out with the old, in with the new. It’s not easy — but it’s essential.
“We’re probably trying to compare too directly to the metrics established for desktop web,” says Paul Bremer, chief revenue officer at Rhythm NewMedia, a platform that connects brand advertisers with mobile audiences.
Bremer thinks mobile and desktop are inherently incomparable because they’re such drastically different mediums.
“You’ve got two kinds of parallel environments: you’ve got apps and you’ve got mobile web,” he says, adding that tablets bring another layer of complexity to the mix.
According to O’Brien, “Forrester found that if marketers could track more reliably, 86 percent would allocate more of their budgets to mobile and 93 percent would run more cross-channel campaigns, something only 13 percent said they felt confident measuring.”