How Does Mobile App Advertising Work?
Understanding The On-Demand Video Streaming App
July 21, 2020
Not many people know how to answer the question “how does mobile app advertising work?” and as a result, a lot of in-app advertising myths persist. Because some advertisers are still hesitant about mobile advertising campaigns, we wanted to clear up the most common misconceptions around mobile in-app advertising.
Myth #1: In-App Reach Isn’t Large Enough To Scale Brand Ad Campaigns
With over& 3 billion smartphone users in the world and over& 200 billion app downloads, the in-app audience is anything but small. Time spent on mobile devices in most major markets is significantly higher than any other platform including traditional TV, desktops, laptops and other connected devices.
In North America, the average user spends around four hours a day on their smartphone, and over 90% of that time is spent in-app. Mobile in-app is also the single largest platform to reach Millennials and Gen Z – who are considered “unreachable” by traditional TV.
Time spent on mobile is quickly growing, and marketers are realizing the importance of engaging with audiences where they spend most of their time. This is why in-app ad revenues have been rising steadily over the past few years.
Myth #2: Users Spend Most Of Their Time Engaging Only With The Largest Social Media Apps
Over the last few years, mobile users have been spending more time outside of the “Walled Garden” social and communication apps. In fact, the average user spends around 50% of their time on mobile engaging with apps across gaming, entertainment, news. weather, utilities and more.
Myth #3: In-App Gaming Can Only Reach Young Males
Gaming is one of the biggest app verticals in terms of users and ad volume, and almost a third of the world’s population will play a mobile game this year. But who are these mobile gamers?
Contrary to popular belief, mobile games have a very diverse user base – with users across all age brackets, and a roughly even gender split. While mid-core and strategy games attract a predominantly male audience, the gender split for casual gaming is nearly even. And when looking specifically at hyper-casual games, females outnumber males.
Myth #4: In-App Inventory Is Highly Susceptible To Fraud And Brand Safety Issues
In the minds of many advertisers, in-app advertising is still a proverbial Wild West, filled with shady players waiting to steal your money.
In truth, however, this perception is far from reality. Over the past few years, the in-app advertising ecosystem has instituted a number of strict guardrails in place to keep fraud low and to ensure that brand ads only appear in the right context and setting.
For example, with programmatic advertising becoming the preferred choice for both the demand and supply sides, Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has introduced measures like app-ads.txt, which solves app misrepresentation by preventing inventory from being sold by unauthorized sellers. These standards have been adopted globally across major app publishers, empowering advertisers to transparently buy programmatic app inventory more confidently.
Pre-bid filters and third-party fraud measurement systems ensure advertisers are protected against fraud. Further, in-app experiences provide predicable, curated content to users which makes them more brand-safe than content that is dynamic in nature – like news and social sites.
