Five tips to kickstart your mobile advertising
Mobile usage is on the rise and it is crucial that online&nbsp;retailers take advantage of this to deliver adverts that engage customers and increase conversation.&nbsp;Mobile advertising strategies are no longer an added bonus for businesses, they should be a necessity. As online retail increases there is lots of money to be gained in targeting customers via their mobile. 
It’s all about mobile now, and yet some people still haven’t gotten it. If you’re in the bunch who are still scratching their heads, trying to figure it all out, marketing display company Criteo has five tips for you.

Mobile phone usage in Australia ranks among the highest in the world, according to a recent eMarketer report. eMarketer estimated 18.9 million mobile phone users in Australia in 2014, accounting for 84 percent of the population.

For online retailers and advertisers, this represents both a massive challenge and an equally massive opportunity. As consumers continue to transition to tablets and smartphones like the iPad and iPhone, it is imperative that online retailers take advantage of increased mobile usage in the market to deliver adverts that engage customers and ultimately increase conversion.

I’m not making the case for targeting mobile customers. It’s a fact of business, and particularly online retail, that mobile is no longer a ‘nice-to- have’ element of your advertising strategy, but rather it should be ‘mobile first’. Mobile spending is rapidly increasing. The latest IAB Australia Online Advertising Expenditure report revealed one in three General Display dollars is being spent on mobile and that mobile ad spend for the quarter ended May 2015 reached $230 million. With an increase of 13.5 per cent year over year, and with Australians spending an estimated $17.1 billion in the last year on online retail (NAB Online Retail Sales Index, May 2015), there are a lot of dollars to be gained by targeting your mobile customers.

Whether you’re an old hand at mobile advertising or you’re taking those first tentative steps into the unknown, below are five tips to increase your conversion rates with mobile advertising that will outstrip your competitors on the playing field.

Personalise, Personalise, Personalise

In this day and age, there is no room for the old-fashioned ‘spray-and-pray’ approach. Customers are accustomed to being tailored to and advertising is no different.

There are advantages to personalised advertising to both the consumer and you, the retailer.

The advantage for the consumer is clear: personalised advertising delivers adverts for products that people have already indicated – through their online behaviour – that they want to see.

You as an online retailer know that your budget is being spent on the right customers, on the right platforms and the ads are being delivered at the right time. If you have the foresight to invest in a powerful analytics solution, the ability to personalise adverts is incredibly simple, and highly effective.

Find an advertising platform that is optimised for display performance advertising on both desktop and mobile. This will also allow you to track key metrics as your campaign progresses.

Personalised adverts foster consumer engagement. In a recent study by Criteo, 186 percent of users exposed to Criteo ads spent way more time on advertisers websites than users who had not been exposed. Additionally, website visitors exposed to targeted adverts were 9.5 times more likely to buy from that website than non-exposed visitors.

More App Engagement, More Sales

Studies have shown that Australians are spending at least two hours per day on their mobile phones, and in addition to this, 41 per cent of people have made purchases through their phone. Criteo’s recent State of Mobile Commerce report for Q2 2015 revealed that 40 per cent of ecommerce transactions actually now involve more than one device and that in the fashion, luxury and travel verticals, one in three transactions are now on mobile devices.

App usage is also increasing with figures from Google in 2013 suggesting that one in three Australians have between 21 and 50 apps on their phones, however, only 16 per cent use between five and six apps per day – that’s a lot of apps being under-utilised and a lot of marketing budget that’s not generating a return.

Criteo’s report also revealed that mobile apps generate almost 50 per cent of mobile transactions for some of the largest ecommerce players who have made their app experience a priority, with higher conversions than desktop. It also showed that sites that are optimised for mobile see a 3.4 per cent conversion rate, more than double that of non-optimised sites where only 1.6 per cent of consumers convert. On average, conversion rates on smartphone are less than tablets or desktops but smartphones still generate more sales due to higher traffic.

So, how do you increase sales on your mobile app? Develop an app with store mode, that’s how. Online retailers report up to five times as much engagement with these apps, including the creation of shopping lists, an increase in the number of items in the shopping list and the number of shopping sessions, as well as increased sales and brand loyalty.

Key store mode features include indoor maps, which enable users to view store layout, services, product locations and shopping list routes. Furthermore it can offer the ability to deliver contextual product suggestions and offers, in-store mobile search, shopper location and geofencing. Store mode also provides retailers with customer insights that enable them to deliver personalised content to users based on their current purchase intent, past purchase behaviours and the shopper’s location inside the store. As a result, retailers have an opportunity to drive additional sales and increase customer loyalty.

As an online retailer, the onus is on you to reactivate your dormant users and target them at the right time. With in-app targeting, it’s possible to concentrate on reactivating these users while they are still in the purchase funnel and deliver personalised ads at the right time to the right user, thereby increasing your conversion rate.

Engage in Real-time Advertising

Real time advertising is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal.

The beauty of real-time advertising is that it targets your visitors almost immediately after they have left your site, when your brand is fresh in their mind, and not one week afterwards. The ability to feature the most relevant product recommendations based on on-site product browsing is a powerful advertising tool.

Take a Fully Integrated Approach

Research by Nielsen and Mediametrie has shown that Performance Display ads deliver measurable results, turning viewers into clickers and ultimately into customers. This is powerful research to have at your disposal as an online retailer. The research tells us that Performance Display has a proven capacity to recruit users that paid search alone cannot address. On average across all industries, 65 per cent of the consumers recruited through Performance Display did not click on paid search.

What does this tell us? It tells us that an advertising campaign should be fully integrated and optimised for search and display, across desktops and mobile.

Measure Everything You Do, But Make It Relevant

Measurement shouldn’t be a time-consuming and laborious process. If anything, as a business owner or a marketer, it should excite you.

Big data shouldn’t mean fat data. Everything you measure should have a purpose and be able to tell you something of value about your business. Be sure that you’re not just tracking clicks and impressions, but also that your focus is on metrics that will allow you to strategise. As an online retailer, you should be measuring the average order value and the conversion rates. On a more finite level, you should then be able to segment that user base in order to increase conversion.

The metrics – even the most granular ones – should give you a big picture overview of the entire business. If you go to the top of Sydney Eye for example, you can look down and immediately see the streets that are gridlocked, the ones where traffic is moving easily and the routes that nobody is bothering to take. A good analytics platform should be like Sydney Eye, enabling you to see the bigger picture, and take clear steps to pull the entire advertising strategy into focus.

Understand which of your channels fit a more linear attribution model, i.e. first click or last click model, and which ones tend to be a multi-channel consumer path to purchase.

Some channels like search will fit better into a ‘last click model’. Others will fit the last click model however there are elements such as retargeting that won’t necessarily fit into either a first click or a last click model.

Irrespective of a multi-touch point model or a linear model, everything should come back to an effective rate. You may pay a cost per acquisition (CPA) for an affiliate campaign but how will you compare that to the conversion from a cost per click (CPC) campaign? In that instance, you must convert that CPA campaign back to aCPC conversion to compare. Only by doing this will you have a level playing field from which to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Mobile is nothing to be daunted by. If anything, it’s one of the most exciting technological advances to occur in years and the good news is, online retailers are in a great position to take advantage of the trend in mobile shopping. Mastering mobile will also prepare marketers for the next big phase — that of a truly global omni-channel experience, where marketers must reach and engage customers across multiple devices and interactive channels along their path to purchase.