Mobile and programmatic - interest vs implementation

Earlier this week, the IAB released its study on mobile marketing and perceptions, from a poll of B2B and B2C brand marketers across all levels of revenue. Responsive design, HTML5 and programmatic buying have been buzzwords in the mobile advertising space for a few years, but it seems that actual rollout and use of these features lags behind interest.

71% of marketers earmarked programmatic buying as either "important" or "very important" for mobile marketing strategy, with 50% saying this applied specifically to real-time bidding (RTB). But, in reality, only 27% of the same marketers polled in the IAB study had used programmatic buying as part of their mobile strategy.

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There are two main concerns about mobile programmatic for brands:

• User privacy issues on mobile.
  
• Device operating system fragmentation: while desktop serves a myriad of browsers within multiple operation systems, different operating systems on mobile often require a greater degree of differentiation.

So how can marketers capitalise on the increasing opportunity that is mobile programmatic and make use of the trend of increasing mobile budgets for marketing?

Here are some do's and don'ts to help marketers overcome their anxiety about making the transition in programmatic from interest to implementation:

Begin with clear goals in mind, and communicate these to your programmatic partner: The concrete business goals of programmatic buys are not always made clear. Communicating exactly what the expected achievement from any programmatic buy is, helps traders optimise towards this goal and creates a more accessible target to aim for and more information to base targeting and optimisation on.

Collect as much data as possible: A common mistake in programmatic is believing that only certain stages of the conversion funnel (the consumer path to reaching the desired conversion point delineated by the advertiser) are important. Even if you don't intend to use consumer segments generated by all pages for retargeting, collecting data at all stages of the conversion funnel can be invaluable for your programmatic partner and optimisation of programmatic buys. This is particularly important for mobile, where methods of collecting data may vary from device to device.

Don't be too restrictive about your audience: Brands often have a strict idea of their core audience and who they want to market to. In mobile, the temptation may be there to limit audiences on the basis of devices or operating systems. But imposing hard constraints on programmatic buys can impose unnecessary limits, and gives any algorithm less information to learn from. If needed, constraints can always be adjusted as the campaign progresses, with real-time learnings to work from.

Develop a more dynamic creative strategy: Being too prescriptive about creative in programmatic is a bad policy to begin with, but in mobile, which has a wider range of screen sizes and resolutions, this error can be downright disastrous. The starting point of creatives for programmatic should be variation. The first week of a campaign can be seen as a creative test - the system can provide a plethora of data on creative performance, which can then be used to tailor and refine images and calls to action.

Don't be too reactive to campaign performance: Any programmatic buy should keep the big picture in mind. Reacting too strongly and requesting too many changes can hamper the system's natural dynamic adaptation to the campaign's environment. Over-correcting for minor changes in performance will require the system to start all over again - in mobile, where there are far more data points to consider, this can have a significant impact on any campaign.

Don't inflate the value of click-through conversions: One of the common practices in programmatic is attributing importance almost wholly to click-through conversions. A comScore study found that only 16% of consumers ever click on ads, and that half of those users account for 85% of clicks. Marketing studies for various brands have attributed as little as 1% of real business revenue to click through conversions, and found that loyal consumers (with repeated purchases) were more likely to be view through converters. Considering only consumers who have clicked on your ad can therefore create a non-representative, and very limited, audience. In mobile, click-through rates are lower than desktop, making this learning even more important.

The more marketers use programmatic in mobile, the greater the data set from which systems and features will be optimised and developed. This paradigm shift can allow marketers to gain an edge over those restricting mobile marketing to traditional channels, and gain valuable consumer and business insight along the way.