Is there anyone who failed to notice the colossal growth of mobile sector within the past years? Undoubtedly, smartphones and tablets have become indispensable in people's lives. The competition between vendors has driven prices down, making mobile communication affordable to a much wider market. The swell of mobile traffic, estimated around 125 percent within the past year and the number of mobile visits, which has grown around 10 times faster, than desktop, can only be described as a worldwide "mobile triumph"!
As for mobile advertising, the industry is at a stage of rapid development, with iOS still being considered the top earner. At the same time, Android OS has already caught up with iOS in terms of ad impression share (both hold approximately 30 percent of the total right now). The correlation is similar, regarding smartphones and tablets, but the latter device type currently has an advantage over the former (63 percent of mobile ad spending).
The incredible growth we witnessed in 2012-2013, naturally, forces small, mid-sized and large publishers to make a decision: either keep up with new developments in the sector or miss the chance of maximizing income from the increasing number of their mobile users.
Similar to versatile display ad formats, mobile ad campaigns also include a vast array of options, not just the commonly-known standard banners, which can often be ineffective. The latest surveys reveal that rich media, e.g. interstitial, expandable or catfish ads are foreseen as the most efficient formats on mobile for Q3 - Q4, 2013 and 2014, especially if they're mixed with video ad content.
iAB Rising Stars ad format has also turned out substantially efficient: it generally receives 98.2 percent user response and is named "very engaging" by around 67.2 percent of mobile visitors. Moreover, custom rich media templates are also considered rather profitable to try out, as they're aimed to fit ad campaigns' specific peculiarities.
It seems obvious, that the mobile audience should receive the same high-level user experience from the company's website, as those visiting it from a PC or a laptop. In this respect, there's an urgent necessity to create a separate mobile site version, optimized for mobile. With Web surfing via mobile browsers being mainly for tablet owners at the moment (about 56 percent of visitors will apply mobile browsers rather than use mobile apps for their searches), the mobile website is becoming vital for the company's profitability sooner than analysts previously expected.
If a business owner still feels cautious and doubtful about whether there is a need to have a separate site version for mobile users, it's possible to consider one more option and that is that a lot of fresh technologies, aimed at monetization of mobile traffic on display sites have already been introduced.
Many solutions are easy to implement and efficient for the company's ad income. As long as the required piece of code is added to the site, the algorithm starts tracking visits from mobile devices and detects their model, so that the customized ad for the particular model is displayed to a user accessing the webpage.
Anton Ruin is CEO of the ad serving solutions company Epom