mjelly mobile 2.0 blog

Admob on mobile advertising @mweb09

Andy Smith, the Sales Director for admob was at the Mobile Web Summit last week talking about what they are up to.  He also hung around a lot during the conference to talk to people which was brilliant - I had a load of questions as a publisher using admob answered by him.  He really confirmed why I love admob as a company - great at what they do and nice people who contribute a lot to the mobile ecoystem.  Anyway, enough of the props, here's a few notes from Andy's presentation.

Mobile ad formats are becoming more developed:

- Text link/ banners
- Lozenge
- Home-screen takeover
- Video
- Interstitial

Actions "after the click" also expanding:

- Microsite
- Iphone app store (a lot of developer using admob to increase downloads and ranking on itunes)
- mapping/ location (e.g. best buy showing your local store on mobile google maps)
- Video streaming/ download (e.g. movie trailor)
- itunes (e.g. for a band pushing to music download)
- Click to call (actually very successful on mobile)
- Form fill in / data capture
- follow on Twitter (not seen that before - quite original)
- add vcard to phone contacts

Case Study - Capital FM iphone app advertised on admob

- aiming to increase rank on app store via advertising
- 1.35% click through rate
- 8% conversion to app store download
- 24k app store visites

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Mobile advertising - CPMs, CPCs, CTRs and CPAs - #mweb09

Here's some notes from the Mobile Web Summit from a presentation by Ben Tatton Brown of the mobile ad buying agency Ring Ring Media.  Ring Ring are pioneers in bringing the agency model to mobile - buying advertising inventory in scale and using deep analysis and testing to optimize campaigns.  I managed to scribble down a few key points from a great presentation that was full of useful data:

- Two types of mobile ad campaigns - Performance campaigns and Brand campaigns

- Performance campaigns typically £5k to £100k per month, run by mobile content companies etc require a lot of work to setup, in depth targeting, 10 different types of creative, multiple landing pages, line-by-line analytics

- Brand campaigns run by the likes of Tesco and Man United are much smaller in scale (£1k to £5k) per month so less interesting for an agency like RIngRing

- Buy advertising from a range of different sources including ad networks, portals, search engines

- CPM advertising typically costs £2 to £20 (for the really big portals)

- CPC from ad networks ranges from 1p to 30p

- Search £1 CPC - search converts much more effectively in general but very little supply - Ring Ring try and buy as much of it as possible

- Seeing a lot of demand for South African traffic at the moment - it converts well

- US traffic is cheap, Indian traffic as low as $0.01 per click

- Click through rates and conversations vary depending on the quality of the traffic

- Search has a 5-20% click through

- Display has a 0.3% to 3% click through (0.3% still higher click thru rate than online)

- track everything from CTR, to CPC, Spend, Conversion Rate etc down to the key metric which is CPA e.g. £3 CPA

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Mobile web affiliate marketing moving up a gear - Mpex network launched

update: mobyaffiliates.com has more information about mobile affiliate marketing

Following on from some recent posts here on mobile internet affiliate marketing and mobile affiliate programs I recently found out about a new mobile internet affiliate network that has just launched. 

Mpex is a mobile web affiliate network which links marketers/ affiliates to a huge range of premium content providers and merchants. 

At the moment the service is mainly plugging in adult content services. However they do have some merchants in other areas including Casino and mobile content (ringtones etc).  It's a truism that the adult content sector always leads a lot of technical and business model innovation and this is definitely the case in terms of mobile affiliate marketing. 

The system MPEX has built is quite simply the most sophisticated mobile affilatiate platform available today.  Some of the features include:

• Choice of a range of different merchants and content providers
• Full microsite builder to create your own sites/ landing pages for the offers
• the ability to create your own network of banners on your affilliate site to retain traffic inside your own network
• full international support with multiple languages and billing system connections
• real time statistics and analytics

I was really impressed with the system these guys have built and the range of merchants available.  They are going to be expanding going forward into developing a non-adult front end and a few other things so lots more innovation to come. 

I really believe this could be on of the first big success stories of mobile affiliate marketing.  For anyone currently running mobile ads on their site or experimenting with mobile affiliate programs you have to give this a go.  Anyway - check out Mpex and see what it can do.

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Mxit is the mobile 2.0 service of the week at Mobile Zeitgeist

This week's mobile 2.0 service of the week over at Mobile Zeitgeist is Mxit.  We've got some new data on the types of mobile advertising formats that mxit is developing and a bit more info about their mobile education pilot. 

For example, the Petrol Station operator Engen ran a campaign in South Africa where it created its own zone on Mxit.  This was linked to a series of posers in station forecourts which had keywords on them which could unlock content such as ringtones and screensavers. 

• 10,000 people added the contact on Mxit
• 3 million messages appeared in the chat zone
• users downloaded 12,000+ content items in 6 weeks

This is really advanced stuff in terms of mobile advertising - going way beyond banners and text ads and its happening in Africa not Europe or the US. 

Anyway you can read the full post over at Mobile Zeitgeist and find mxit on our mobile directory at mjelly.com:

Download Mxit pro on mjelly

Download Mxit elite on mjelly

Download Mxit Blackberry on mjelly

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Tesco using click-to-call mobile ads in the UK - mobile advertising going mainstream

Tesco is the biggest supermarket in the UK and the world's third largest retailer in the world. When they start using mobile marketing you know that things are really happening.  Anyway, I noticed that they have begun to start serving ads on admob using a click to call format - advertising their financial products.  This is really fantastic for the mobile ad market for a number of reasons:

• Tesco is a mainstream business not a mobile content company - which means that mobile advertising is starting to get budgets from a range of new sectors
• Tesco spends huge amounts of money each year on advertising - it will have a big impact on the mobile ad market if they start to shift spend onto the platform
• Tesco are clearly seeing mobile as a direct-response ad medium - the fact that they are using click-to-call suggests that mobile can drive sales effectively just like online search ads

Here is a screenshot of the ad on the mjelly mobile site - Tesco are using a mixture of text and text + banners with clear calls to action:

Once you click on the ad you go through to a landing page.  I did notice that they are not really varying the landing page for the different ad creative - you see the same page whether you have clicked on an insurance or credit card ad.  This is something they should look to improve if they want to get the best conversions possible.

Once you click through from the landing page you are taken to a click to call page which allows you to fire up a telephone call via a graphical button. 

This campaign is great news for mobile - let us know if you see anything similar out there.

Mobile Affiliate Programs

update: you can check out mobyaffiliates.com for in-depth info about mobile affiliate networks and listings of mobile affiliate programs

Following a post on mobile internet affiliate marketing, we've been getting a lot of emails asking about mobile affiliate programs.  Mobpartner - one of the major players in mobile affiliate marketing just announced a new mobile affiliate program on their platform - Pleex. 

#Update2 - I found another mobile affiliate network called MPEX which is worth checking out

Pleex is a software that lets your users to backup and store their mobile data: pictures, videos, mp3s and contacts between their phone and the web.

Here are the payout rates for a new account created in these countries - european users generate the highest payouts:

France: $0.50
United Kingdom: $0.35
Spain: $0.35
Italy: $0.35
Germany: $0.20
Other European countries: $0.20
United States: $0.20
India: $0.10
African countries: $0.10
All others countries: $0.08

Sign-up to the Pleex affiliate program here

Mobpartner has a load other mobile web CPA programs available:

Mobiluck

MobiLuck is a free mobile site that allows you to earn money for each visitor that creates an account on MobiLuck from your link. It is free to join the service so should be fairly easy to convert, again the highest payout rates are for European markets. 

Payouts

France : $0.55
United Kingdom : $0.45
Spain : $0.45
Germany : $0.23
United States : $0.18
Portugal : $0.18
Saudi Arabia : $0.18
United Arab Emirates : $0.14
All others countries : $0.09

Sign-up to the mobiluck affiliate program here

Jamster

The jamster mobile site offers branded popular content from around the world including chart-topping music from top music labels, mobile games, and original content made exclusively for mobile phones.

2 countries are open on the mobpartner platform : USA and United Kingdom - they say 17 new countries are coming soon

Revenue : Jamster/Jamba provides $7 on each sale (e.g. a sign-up to one of their subscription schemes)

Sign-up to the jamster affiliate program here

With the cost of mobile ad inventory falling this is a great time for mobile affiliate marketers (cheaper traffic available, plus less opportunity cost from not running mobile ads instead of affiliate programs). Watch this space for more stuff on mobile affiliate marketing...

You can find more mobile affiliate programs at mobyaffiliates.com

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admob price drop - lower cost mobile inventory

Admob recently announced a big price drop on certain bits of inventory.  As the biggest player in the mobile advertising industry admob's pricing really makes a big difference to the market overall.  The reduction in costs for certain ads potentially opens up the market for PPC arbitrage in mobile for people using mobile affiliate marketing or other mobile advertising networks.  Also the drop in iphone advertising prices in particular might open up opportunities for iphone developers looking for a way of promoting their app.

For publishers running admob's ads this is a mixed blessing.  On the one hand, fill rates for inventory have skyrocketed after being at a very low level earlier this year.  On the other hand, higher fill rates come at the cost of a lower eCPM.  It may be that admob is lowering its prices as publishers are starting to use mobile ad network aggregators and their own ad servers to push in inventory from other mobile ad networks to make up the gap left by admob's higher prices. 

The details of the price cuts are below:

iphone ads

For iPhone ads targeting all United States traffic (i.e., all US with no further targeting options selected), the minimum bid will decrease from $0.10 to $0.05.

Ads targeting specific carriers
The minimum bid for targeting for big 4 US carriers (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile & Verizon) will remain unchanged, ranging from $0.11 - $0.15.  The minimum bid for targeting for all other carriers will decrease from between $0.11 - $0.15 to $0.05.

Ads targeting all countries and carriers
For non-iPhone ads targeting all countries and carriers (i.e., no further targeting options selected), the minimum bid will decrease from $0.03 to $0.01.

Admob fighting click fraud and banning sites

At the moment lots of people are setting up mobile ad networks and admob is the leading player in the market for them to catch.  However, one area where admob has a real advantage is fraud... just as on PC based adnetworks like adwords and adsense click fraud is a massive problem for any ad network.  This is particularly true for mobile where a lot of small publishers are involved and have a real incentive to create fraudelent clicks to raise earnings.  Admob has been brilliant at extending its platform to smaller publishers and helping them make money on mobile.  However, this has also left them open to click-fraud.  It is pretty clear that admob have a lot of detection measures in place to find click fraud and are banning sites suspected of it - much to the fury of those they suspect, check out these quotes from the admob forums:

"I registered a account with Admob this month and started sending traffic.. I have accumulated a reasonably large amount.

However today when I check,

1) No adverts are showing.
2) Cannot log into my account.

From what I have read here I have gathered that this has been happening to alot of people?

I have also spoken to a few publishers in my country and most "Big" ones with Admob seem to be having the same problem.

Is it not possible that Admob is Scamming "Big" publishers out of their earnings and paying the smaller ones so that no-one will catch on?

My website has not broken any rules which is why I find this very strange.

However I have submitted a query to Admob Support and I am now awaiting their response.

If their is anyone else that can shed some light on this issue, please do."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Hi i get banned or somethink my ads are showing but i cant log in to my account it says invalid username or password i have banned or somethink also on other account its also cant log in to account but ads are showing I DIDINT BREAK RULES. .lt also susport dont reply to me ..."

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"Hi, my friend owns a few wap site and he as been with admob from early 2007 he had over 3000USD in is account and recently he try to log in and cant log in, thats not fare.. and he showed me the email that admob sent him about some payper click ----, and i can gurantee that he isnt doign any cheating, admob staffs are not being fare.. with the publishers...and i have heard of smilar complains publishers account being disabled.. i my self have been a victim a few months back.. i just wana oopen publishers eyes. that one morning you might get up and your account disabled permanently. "

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"As of today I have been unable to sign in to my admob account, I have requested a password change and this is reporting as successful however I am still unable to sign in.

I have emailed support regarding this, and am yet to receive a response. I'm just trying to find out if this is a generic problem or one which is affecting my account only. Does anyone else have a problem logging in at the moment?"

Whilst there are lots of ad networks around, only the biggest and best like admob can afford to really invest in areas like clickfraud prevention.  As awareness of this becomes larger it can only help the leading players in the market such as admob. 

Admob growing pains - more inventory means lower fill rates

Admob is simply the best mobile ad platform out there and they are growing like mad at the moment with a load of funding in the bank and more and more sites signing up to them as publishers.  The problem is that "fill rates" for publishers (the amount of ad inventory that admob serves ads in) are falling very sharply at the moment. 

Admob continues to grow the number of ads served so its more a problem of supply of mobile inventory outstripping demand.  A big part of admob's recent funding is going towards more sales staff which should help to bring on board more advertisers, but at the moment publishers are really finding that their fill rates are very low indeed.

This is felt particularly keenly by smaller publishers, who admob has done a great job of bringing into the mobile ad market right from the start.  Some of these guys were doing extremely well out of mobile advertising in the early days and are now finding that it is no longer paying.  This post on the admob forum sums it up quite nicely"

"GangSta wrote:

Here are the actual stats I copied and pasted from my admob account.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Summary of activity : 2007-11-01 to 2007-11-31
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ad Rqsts: Imprsns: Fill Rate: eCPM: CPC Revenue Total Revenue:
1,588,388 1,588,388 100.00% $0.66 $1,180.28 $1,180.28
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Summary of activity : 2008-11-01 to 2008-11-31
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ad Rqsts: Imprsns: Fill Rate: eCPM: CPC Revenue Total Revenue:
984,785 322,097 31.51% $0.32 $102.64 $102.64
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I feel shame to post it.But it's the bitter truth about admob.I hope company will do better in 2009. But It became a dream which is not coming true. I earned more than $60 a day that time.But now just $ 1-$2."

If anyone can fill all this new mobile inventory it is admob but they have a big job to do - what is probably needed is more mobile affiliate marketing programs who will take high volumes of low cost inventory...

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Buzz City mobile ad network still growing strongly despite recession

BuzzCity is a mobile advertising network which isn't that big in Europe but in developing markets and to a less extent the US it is really pretty big. They release a Mobile Advertising Index report every quarter which makes some interesting reading.  First thing to note is that Buzz City is bucking the recession and still growing its inventory and sales.  Also Buzzcity is building the type of scale that can challenge the market leader admob, which is serving 5bn + ads per month.  Buzz City is approaching a similar scale.

In the 4th Quarter, just over 7.5 billion advertiser banners were delivered
across the entire network. This represents a Q-on-Q growth of 40%, a
slight increase from the previous quarterly growth rate (38%). 

By 31st December 2008 the advertising network has served some 19.5 billion advertising banners in 2008.

Top 5 countries

Buzz City is benefiting from really strong scale in developing markets like Indonesia:

Indonesia remains in top position and yet again showed very strong
growth (100%). Over the whole year some 7 billion banners were
served to Indonesian audiences. 

Obviously this traffic isn't that valuable but what might worry admob is that Buzz City is also seeing strong growth in the US market:

USA moved into 4th place with strong continued growth of 47% and 382m ads served

Another interesting point is that South Africa, which was once the real growth driver on mobile internet seems to be suffering a traffic decline.

This could be because Vodacom has put in a transcoder and apparently has been hiking GPRS tariffs.  It is a real shame to see South Africa apparently in decline like this - in an area where they lead the world in many respects. 

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