Although the mobile ad is over two years old, some companies are interestingly only starting to see the advantages of the mobile ad today. 

The mobile ad is a force to be reckoned with, and Facebook’s (News - Alert) success in shifting to mobile advertizing shows that it works – though it wasn’t without some challenges to start with.

Facebook started testing mobile ads in February of this year, and according to some ad performance tests the mobile ads are now bringing in more money than the desktop ads. The numbers speak for themselves: Desktop news feed plus sidebar ads have a 0.083-percent click-through rate (CTR), and effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM) for the client is $0.74. Desktop news feed is 0.588 percent CTR, with $3.12 eCPM.  

Mobile news feed holds a 1.40-percent CTR, with $9.86 eCPM.

The reason for more success in the mobile ad versus the desktop ad is that Americans are now spending more time in from of their mobile phone screen than their desktop screen. As a matter of fact, for those who have Facebook accounts and own both a computer and a mobile phone, they spend 441 hours a month on their mobile, as opposed to only 391 hours per month on their desktop.

This could have turned out to be big money loss for social media such as Facebook. This is why the mobile news feed was needed in order to bring back ad revenues for Facebook.

But the challenge was the space. While Facebook can show up to seven ads on its website, for lack of room and to avoid annoying their visitors, they can only show a handful of ads per day. For this reason, Facebook warned its investor just last month that when people accessed their site through mobile instead of their website, it was bad business for Facebook.

This is a problem of the past, however, as Facebook was able to crack the code of the mobile ad. With no side bar to show ads and the impossibility to show too many ads, Facebook was still able to get good results with CTR and eCPM.  

Now advertisers are rushing in. “By allowing advertisers to show ads only on mobile, Facebook is definitely going to be able to generate more revenue,” said AdParlor CEO Hussein Fazal. “We have seen a ton of interest from advertisers who want to advertise just on mobile.”