Mobile Manifesto » Chitika

Mobile Commerce – Not your mama’s monitization

David Eads — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 01:02:58 +0000

This morning I received some interesting statistics in my email inbox. Many of you might have received it as well. I reposted it here.

: Mobile Internet Usage by Phone, Chitika Network 9/2009

iPhone consistently covers 2/3 of mobile users

The first thing I noticed was how consistently iPhone usage is measured at around 66% of mobile usage to a given site. This is what I’ve seen in my experience with a number of organizations. I’ve also seen this stat elsewhere. It’s easy to understand why companies with a tight budget pick the iPhone when forced to pick one mobile platform.

Smartphone almost as happy with their browser as computer users

Secondly, I was surprised to find that smartphone users (68%) were almost as satisfied with using their browser on their phone as computer users (70%). Not surprisingly, feature phone users felt differently (47%).

Coincidentally, Adam Woozeer (@AdamWoozeer) tweeted yesterday that “About 58% of total #IPhone users primarily use the iphone for web.” I’m haven’t been able to verify his data, but it seems to fit with the Chitika data. I might have ignored each of these data points individually, but together they made me take note.

Personally, I use my iPhone browser extensively, but I wouldn’t call it my “primary browser.” I certainly don’t interact with web sites in the same way on my iPhone as I do on my computer. Despite all the power of the iPhone browser, I tend to do everything mobile in task-oriented, bite-sized chunks. For me, this is as true for applications as it is when browsing web sites. In fact, web site loading is often just slow enough that I abandon the site all together rather than wait (I use the original iPhone without 3G).

Smartphone click through rates much lower than computer users

This is almost heresy. The conventional wisdom in mobile advertising is that mobile has much higher click through rates than computers (e.g. mobile ads are more valuable), although the tide may be turning. Chitika found the opposite. Chitika found that smartphone mobile advertising click through rates (0.48%) are much less than online click through rates (0.83%).

Mobile Internet Browsing & Clickthroughs
*Smartphone Systems*	*% Hits*	*Clickthrough Rate* (% of browsing, rounded)
iPhone	66%	0.30%
Other	24	0.92
Windows CE	2	0.61
Palm	2	0.89
Android	6	0.45
Total Mobile		0.48
Source: Chatika, September 2009

The much lower mobile click through rate for mobile makes sense given the impatient, bite-sized behavior mobile consumers display. The stratospherical and often unsubstantiated click through rates quoted by mobile vendors with a vested interest (see link above) may not hold up in less controlled circumstances with larger sample sizes.

Maybe Monetization isn’t all about ecommerce-style advertising…

According to the stats above, smartphone users essentially consider their phone browser as good as a computer browser, yet they are far less responsive to traditional advertising.

Ultimately the lower click through rate suggests that ecommerce-style mobile advertising isn’t the best way to monetize mobile. The mobile context is just different. Mobile requires a different approach than ecommerce.

And from this point there aren’t easy, tested answers to the right way to proceed. It all depends.

Best practices will arise. But for now success relies upon knowing what others have tried and the history of what-works-where and what-doesn’t. Mobile monetization should also include actual commerce, which ironically most mcommerce lacks. Product placement and transactional revenue models also are appearing to work well in certain contexts.

Resources are tight and the stakes are high. This is no time to wander into the wilderness alone.

We would love to be your sherpa. Drop us a line: info@MobileStrategyPartners.com.

Mobile Internet Engagement and Ad Clickthroughs Out of Sync

David Eads — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:59:54 +0000

(NOTE: This is a reprint of an email I received 9/23/09. I didn’t see it online so I’m reposting here and will refer to in in a subsequent blog. All attributions follow the article. I am not responsible for any of the content of this article. Read at your own risk. )

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Mobile Internet Engagement and Ad Clickthroughs Out of Sync

According to the results of research exploring mobile Internet engagement levels among smartphone owners, as compared to owners of other devices, InsightExpress found that 68% of smartphone users reported feeling positively engaged (enjoyment in activity) while using the mobile Internet, second only to the 70% of users who were positively engaged while on a computer. Alternately, only 47% of feature phone users reported positive mobile site engagement.When mobile Internet users were asked to identify the top three elements that most influence their decision to return to a mobile Internet site, they reported:

The speed at which the site loads
The ease of navigation on the site
The quality of the content on the site itself

Among mobile Internet users, several small but telling differences were revealed when comparing smartphone owners to feature phone owners, says the report:

Both groups prioritized the speed at which a mobile site loads,
Smartphone users looked next at the quality of the content, ranking ease of navigation as less important
Feature phone users found ease of navigation almost as essential as their number one concern, how fast the mobile site loads.

Mobile Web site features that had the least impact on a users decision to make a return visit were the absence of advertising, the ability to personalize, and the number of links, videos or images on the site. Publishers will likely welcome the news that the presence of advertising on a site does not lessen its appeal, concludes the study.

Joy Liuzzo, Director of Marketing and Mobile Research. “Mobile advertising presents a unique opportunity to take advantage of high engagement levels and less clutter on the pages… advertisers enjoy a large share of voice per page since there is often only one advertisement on the page and it takes up more screen space… ”

And, an almost concurrent study by Chitika of mobile vs. non-mobile Internet usage, based on a sample of 93 million impressions, mobile users are approximately half as likely to click on an advertisement as non-mobile users. Non-mobile held an 0.83% clickthrough rate, while mobile as a whole pulled a mere 0.48% – just over half of the average.

It appears, given the numbers, that mobile users are not receptive to advertising. This phenomenon that is not surprising, concludes the report, given the mobile users’ propensity to be searching for quick answers or directions.

Of the five major smartphone operating systems, iPhone ranked the worst for clickthrough rate at 0.30%. iPhone also accounted for the bulk of mobile hits, at 66%. The group which clicked on ads the most is the “Other” group, comprised mainly of BlackBerry users and a small handful of other phone operating systems (including Symbian, Nokia, and HTC).

Mobile Internet Browsing & Clickthroughs
*Smartphone Systems*	*% Hits*	*Clickthrough Rate* (% of browsing, rounded)
iPhone	66%	0.30%
Other	24	0.92
Windows CE	2	0.61
Palm	2	0.89
Android	6	0.45
Total Mobile		0.48
Source: Chatika, September 2009

The clickthrough rates, says the report, are certainly lower than expected, given the industry’s general consensus that mobile users are more likely to click ads. Possibly, concludes the study, because the ads displayed on mobile devices are the same as the ones displayed to non-mobile, rather than comparing standard online advertising with mobile-oriented ads.

However, concludes the report, though “… (though) mobile accidental clicks are more relevant than in non-mobile ad serving, it appears that mobile Internet users are disinterested in advertising at an extremely high rate… ”

To review the Chitika report, please visit here, and to read the InsightExpress release in its entirety, please go here.

We use the term research in the broadest possible sense. We do not perform an audit, nor do we analyze the data for accuracy or reliability. Our intention is to inform you of the existence of research materials and so we present reports as they are presented to us. The only requirements we impose are that they are potentially useful and relevant to our readers and that they pass the rudimentary test of relying on acceptable industry standards. We explicitly do not take responsibility for the findings. Please be aware of this and check the source for yourself if you intend to rely on any of the data we present.

You are receiving this newsletter at as part of your free membership with MediaPost. If this issue was forwarded to you and you would like to begin receiving a copy of your own, please visit our site – www.mediapost.com – and click on [subscribe] in the e-newsletter box.
For advertising opportunities see our online media kit. If you’d rather not receive this newsletter in the future click here. We welcome and appreciate forwarding of our newsletters in their entirety or in part with proper attribution.
(c) 2009 MediaPost Communications, 1140 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10001