Every business wants to be on Mobile. Also the fact that businesses are searching out for the new advertising channels to advertise brings in Mobile Ads space in equation. Lots of companies still don’t have any allocation for the Mobile Ads spend let alone some of the other few who want to experiment with a miniscule ad spend as % of their total spend. Atleast those who are willing to spend have been guided by some agencies who are following the market trend. The problem is however compounded when the agencies propose to the companies a half baked strategy wherein they run only the so called Mobile Ads without worrying about to verify whether the business has a corresponding presence over Mobile platform or not. The running of Mobile Ads without a corresponding Call to Action on the mobile is bound to fail. We see reports everyday that people access more web over their mobile than their computers these days in India. Companies have to change fast as well if they are looking to tap this clientele.
The Mobile Ads strategy has to be complemented along with either a Mobile Website or a call to action which will make the user to download their “mobile app”. Some of the business who got it right are ClearTrip and FlipKart. There would be others also but these two are the ones who are clear about their Mobile presence strategy. I would imagine the volume of transactions from Flipkart’s Mobile web interface would be very very negligible as compared to the web revenues but still it fits into the overall strategy and the fact that user knows he can shop on his mobile also from Flipkart without going to the web on his computer or laptop.
Then there is a problem of where to run the Ads. Google’s (Admod) network is the trusted one and there are others like InMobi. But our experience has shown some of the reputed names in the industry (without naming them) are not able to provide us the “Fills” i.e we are surprisingly not able to burn our budget for running the ads although they are making tall claims. Also the Ads platform should allow the GEO targeting (within Indian cities) which some of them provide currently and that too not very accurate.
Overall Mobile Ads should definitely have a bigger chunk of the total ads spend for any business but it has to be done in a right manner accompanied by a friendly mobile website which can be used on a smartphone. Then only it will make more sense. Until then the Mobile spends won’t be able to show the “results” in the era of “misclicks”.