ADOTAS — As people switch from one device to another throughout their day, advertisers have had a doozy of a time keeping track of consumers to target them with consistent ad campaigns. Today, AOL released its first set of findings from a new cross-channel advertising study in conjunction with University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), finding that nearly a third (31 percent) of sales conversions across the verticals of travel, retail, auto and telecom, came from mobile devices.
The goal of this research is to better understand how consumers interact with content across multiple devices like desktop computers, mobile phones and tablets. AOL and University of Virginia examined performance data from over 500 billion online ad impressions and 100M conversion events across all devices. AOL touts this study as the industry’s largest cross-platform study conducted to date.
In an exclusive interview with Chad Gallagher (pictured), director of mobile for AOL Networks, Adotas learned that the study was a University of Virginia Systems Engineering capstone project. According to Gallagher, AOL gave UVA engineering and PhD students access to an expansive set of Advertising.com data and asked them to compare that data to common beliefs marketers hold about mobile.
“Our students get hands on, real world experience working with a company like AOL analyzing mobile data to help drive real marketing objectives,” noted William T. Scherer, professor with the Department of Systems and Information Engineering at the University of Virginia. “What’s exciting about this research is that we’re beginning to get a much clearer view of how consumers are interacting with Internet-connected devices.”
The study findings reveal that mobile conversions have grown quickly: over the past year, the cross-industry conversion rate for mobile grew 28%. The industries with the highest mobile conversion rates were telecom at 37% (purchasing of new plans and devices) and retail at 35% (making a purchase). Auto was next at 22% (finding a local dealer, requesting more information, configuring a car and travel) and travel at 20% (booking a hotel, flight or car reservation).
“What we’re learning is that consumers are increasingly using their mobile devices in much the same way they do with their computers when they’re at home,” said Gallagher. “Looking at holistic impression volume, 25 percent of all digital impressions are consumed on a mobile device at home – which speaks to why users are performing complex functionality on their mobile devices. The data means that companies must understand mobile tracking and enable technology that can run across all platforms to account for the massive business opportunity on mobile devices. Net-net, we need to re-think how we market through the tablet. Marketers are realizing that they can’t afford to run desktop-only campaigns anymore.”
When coupled with programmatic ad serving technologies, Gallagher believes these types of technologies can create the most effective solution that can target, decision and optimize towards a brand’s goal across digital platforms at scale. Other companies like Drawbridge, TapAd and RadiumOne are also helping advertisers connect the dots across multiple screens and devices for multi-channel ad campaigns through different approaches some using probability, data-heavy regression analysis and others through one-to-one deterministic matching.
“We are just getting started in analyzing all of the data,” said Gallagher. “The next phase of the study will focus an eye towards better understanding cross-device behavior, with the ultimate goal of understanding how behavior on one device effects conversion rates on a secondary device. The days of the desktop-only campaign are over. The future of digital advertising is clearly using technology to decision, target, and optimize advertising across all digital platforms. To stay competitive, brands must drive massive performance on devices outside of the traditional desktop.”
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