Mobile App Ads: Does OS Impact Conversion?

Mobile apps must be marketed, but what is the best way to market them? Should you use text ads, expandables, banner ads, interstitials or some combination of these within the app? An App Insight Report recently published by InMobi indicated the highest converting type of app ad is an interstitial ad on an Android device, which boasts a conversion rate over 3%. An interstitial ad looks like the image on the right:

On Apple devices, text ads had the highest conversion rates: close to 2%. In the banner ad category, such ads on Android devices converted at 1.12% versus 1.4% on Apple devices. Perhaps the most glaring difference was in the category of expandables, which convert at .63% on Android devices and 1.65% on iOS, which indicates the user experience for the same type of ad varies quite dramatically between operating systems. 

In summary, InMobi recommends marketers consider using some combination of banner ads and interstitials, which they claim gives marketers a broad reach... but this all depends on app category, as banner ads vary highly among categories, as eMarketer indicates in the table below: