by Daniel Ruby, Research Director, Online Insights, Chitika, Inc-

Recently, we at Chitika ran a study regarding the ad clickthrough rates of mobile vs. non-mobile users across our advertising network.  Given the general consensus of the ad industry that mobile ads are extremely effective, I expected to see a noticeable difference between standard Web ads and mobile ones.  I was right – but not in the way that I expected.

Comparing the same ads across the same network of websites, mobile Internet users were approximately half as likely to click on an advertisement as a non-mobile user.

 

Why the discrepancy?  Our report was as close to an apples-to-apples comparison as we could do.  Rather than comparing standard contextual ads to targeted mobile ads, we were showing exactly the same ads throughout, with the purpose of finding out as much as we could about mobile consumers' behavior patterns.

 

When you look at the intent of mobile users, the reason seems painfully simple: mobile Internet browsing, while improving greatly, has only recently begun to have the same potential as computer-based browsing.  The entire mobile browsing ecosystem has generated a certain set of expectations for mobile users, and the searches generally are geared towards the instant answering of a question (trivia, local restaurants, train times, etc.) with very little willingness to deviate from that singular goal.

Non-mobile browsing, on the other hand, sees people who are just “surfing,” a phenomenon almost unknown in the mobile world.  While surfing, non-mobile users are less focused on a specific task, and are thus more willing to be diverted – if you're looking up information on a band you like, sure, you might be open to checking out a shop that sells vintage records, so long as you know that you can easily return to your casual web browsing at any time.

That brings up another issue for mobile browsing: data transfer speed.  While 3G cellular networks are becoming the rule rather than the exception, people are still trained psychologically to view cellular data transfers as both slow and expensive.  An Internet detour like an advertisement thus becomes much more of a roadblock than it is for someone who has gotten used to unlimited in-home broadband over the course of several years – a roadblock that consumes time and precious data transfer limits.

So the question becomes: how do we succeed at advertising to mobile users?  Obviously, given recent reports and estimates, mobile ads are a huge wave coming to crash over the advertising world.  But if this study shows one thing, it should be that you can't approach mobile users in the same way you approach home or office Internet users.  Timing and non-intrusiveness become key.  Perhaps the timing factor is one of the reasons SMS marketing has thus far been successful – the message is there, but if the mobile user is not ready to view it at the exact moment it arrives, it remains and can be viewed later.  Ads in websites can't say the same thing, and that appears to be a hurdle for “traditional” online ad networks like Chitika to deal with in the near future.

It appears that mobile users are averse to advertisements.  Based on the numbers, one can come away with that conclusion, however it will require careful observation and testing of a variety of ad types – in-page, SMS, email, etc. - coming to mobile users in order to determine why and when they are willing to consider an advertising communication.  One thing is for certain though: as mobile browsing increases and smartphones start to kill off dumb phones, both ad networks and publishers who make their money from advertising are going to have to figure this out.