The mobile marketing opportunity is getting tough to ignore and improving technology is surely paving way for new social advertisement opportunities. SocialCode, a Facebook (News - Alert) Ads API partner, suggests that sponsored story-like ads that appear in mobile news feeds get more clicks than the same units placed elsewhere.
Various studies indicate that display and search ads on smartphones generally have higher click-through rates than desktop ads. SocialCode’s research examined more than 7 million Facebook impressions served between June 8 and June 18 for 12 SocialCode clients who were running fan-acquisition campaigns, including about 242,000 mobile news-feed impressions that generated 1,911 clicks.
According to the company, the click-through rate for mobile ads amounted to 0.79 percent, compared to the 0.148 percent average across all five placements studied: mobile, desktop news-feed only, desktop only, news-feed only and the control group. The click-through rate for desktop-only news-feed ads fell roughly in the middle at 0.327 percent, according to SocialCode's data.
Effective CPMs for the mobile ads, which were bought on a cost-per-click basis along with the other inventory in the research, were $7.51, compared to the $1.62 average across all five placements.
“The higher CPMs for mobile ads were largely due to the higher click-through rates they've been generating. She pointed to the fact that news-feed ads are less disruptive, since they're meant to blend into the user experience,” Addie Conner, chief innovation officer at SocialCode said in a press release.
"If you can make it an ad that users don't hate, it's actually extremely monetizable," added Conner.
However, the company statement also highlights on the argument that click-through rates aren't really the right metric to be looking at anyway, since a recent study from the startup Pretarget and ComScore shows the correlation between that click and a conversion is virtually nonexistent.
Even if mobile ads are non-disruptive and more native to the user experience, causing users to click on them more, there's also still the question of whether Facebook can get the frequency right. In other words, even if the ads work, can Facebook deliver enough of them to make serious money without cluttering up mobile users' news feeds with sponsored stories?
Back in August 2011, SocialCode announced results from a new Facebook advertising research study. The research examined over four million data points across over 50 clients from a wide variety of industries to get a better understanding of how age and gender affect click-through rates (CTR) and 'Like' rates on Facebook.
TMCnet recently reported that Nanigans, Inc., a Facebook performance advertising company focused on helping marketers maximize ROI, released a new mobile advertising feature that enables marketers to reach Facebook users on their mobile devices. Facebook recently announced the ability for advertisers to purchase “Sponsored Stories in News Feeds” specifically on mobile through its Ads API.
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Edited by Rachel Ramsey