Engagement–not clicks–is what matters most in mobile marketing. In June of 2012, we designed a high-engagement mobile ad unit for pharmaceutical advertisers. It’s called the “Ask Your Doctor” ad unit. Pharmaceutical advertisers are always telling the public to ask the doctor about their drugs. Many already publish questions that the ad network can copy and paste to setup the campaign. Success for this campaign would be measured by average clicks per user. The goal is to discover how deeply the average person who did show interest dives into the ad. With traditional mobile banner advertising, measuring engagement can be tricky. The user typically clicks one or twice and is redirected to a mobile landing page.
It’s up to the advertiser to setup their own analytics package and measure post-click behavior. While this is possible, it’s not turn-key, and the ad network most likely can’t tap into these metrics. Ad Networks should embrace this ad unit because they can show engagement metrics without having to rely on a marketer’s analytics package.
The depth of interaction is built directly into the ad unit. Many mobile advertisers are not committed enough in mobile to do post-click analysis on their end. They may miss the deeper metrics, and the ad network may miss out on future mobile spend. Thanks to Alek for design collaboration and coding.
P.S. Here is a PDF one sheet with a media placement idea on medical directories.