Friday, February 13, 2015

Compare the performance of channels across Mobile & Laptop

As we have covered topics about natural search, paid search and online display advertisement, it would be interesting to explore a bit about the performance of each channel. Here I would like to share some insightful metrics from Marin Software indicating the effectiveness of each channel.


In its Q4 2014 Benchmark Report, Marin Software, an online advertising company that is managing $6 billion in annualized ad spending across the web and mobile devices, looked at performance by device across social, display and search campaigns running through its platform. Overall, desktops lost 6.3 percent of click share, primarily to smart phones, which grew by 4.8 percent.

First of all, let’s take a look at click-through rate across platforms.


Obviously, the noticeable trend here is that advertisement engagement rates on mobile devices outperform desktop on all three platforms as search remains a dominant position over other platforms.

However, when it comes to conversion rates, things become a little dramatic. Conversion rates continue to be far lower on mobile devices compared to desktop and tablets.

From my point of view, lower conversion rates on mobile devices, especially in terms of online search, are mainly driven by the habit of consumer when they use online search. First, people tend to search on mobile devices when they need to explore a concept, find a place, check item availability or just quickly grab some information. Their intentions are not directly related to purchase. But people will absolutely be influenced by advertisements through such search experience. It just the matter of how we should measure this kind of hidden impact while conversion rate did a poor job so far. Secondly, only those “quick tasks” seem to be reasonable handled through our mobile phones. This means the period of time that consumers spent on each mobile search might be too short to actually stimulate a purchase.

Marin Software conducts 57% of its campaigns on Facebook with more than 60% of clicks come from mobile devices. However, only 34% of conversions happened on mobile.

Cost-per-click (CPC) mirrors conversion performance. CPCs are highest on desktop on search, social and display, and overall, CPCs are higher on search, followed by display and social.


As consumers continue to spend more time on their mobile devices, it seems quite necessary for companies and marketers to figure out a better way that brings more sales on mobile devices. It is also interesting for us to keep an eye on this trend.



Data and graphs cited from: http://www.marinsoftware.com/data-integration/channel-connect


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