The hurdles were high but now – for the first time – mobile retargeting on a global scale has become a reality. Retargeting describes the ability to re-advertise to the 98% of shoppers who look but don’t buy, or to the 60% who leave their shopping basket agonisingly full but fail to checkout.
It has finally come of age for mobile. Advertisers have been able to retarget consumers on desktop for some years, with much success. Now, new technology means that this success can be translated for the benefit of the growing brigade of mobile shoppers. 2013 is going to see mobile retargeting seriously
taking off.
The speed of mobile’s crusade against the PC has been so rapid that many marketers have been left reeling. But while the web took fi fteen years to disrupt everything, it has only taken the smartphone fi ve. During these fi ve short years 45% of all American adults have acquired a smartphone and 18% have
a tablet of some kind. These figures are only set to rise: analysts are predicting that within two years 90% of mobile users will own a smartphone.
New technology, enhanced opportunity
M-commerce – the purchasing of products on smartphones and tablets – is booming, as sales fi gures over the holiday season 2012 have shown. We have seen that click-through rates on mobile ads rose 23% over the Thanksgiving weekend. This compares to a rise of only 5% in click-through rates on desktop-displayed ads over the same period. Importantly, we have found that retargeted mobile ad campaigns generate, on average, an impressive 40% conversion rate from previously abandoned leads.
Until recently, mobile retargeting has been impossible due to strict mobile privacy regulations. However, new mobile retargeting technology is now available that has been specifi cally developed to comply with the relevant privacy regulations. The technology securely maps anonymously held keys to a given user. Supporting this technology are five servers handling 85 million user records and processing thousands of queries per second, per server, at an average query time of five milliseconds.
Advantages of retargeting and mobile provide real ROI for advertisers
So, while adhering to the highest privacy standards, mobile retargeting can now enable advertisers to re-engage consumers who have previously shown an interest but never actually committed to purchase. It is estimated that just 2% of online shoppers make a purchase on their first visit to an e-commerce site. With mobile retargeting, marketers can take advantage of location tracking and RTB, to retarget relevant ads at the right time and place, to the right audience, on the right device.
Mobile is scaling rapidly which means that brands can now target and retarget mobile users in 220 countries, which means that there are a potential 60 billion monthly impressions available for monetization. Performance marketing, charging on a results-only basis, is perfectly positioned to help advertisers
take advantage of this massive opportunity.