Top 5 reasons why mobile retargeting is growing popular
Ever since the advent of smartphones and tablets, e-buyers are constantly evolving – the upshot has been an incremental effort to connect with consumers through mobiles. Consequently, mobile retargeting has transitioned from the ‘good-to-have’ to the ‘must-have’ list for advertisers around the globe. But is this shift owing to the user’s growing affection for mobile devices alone?
As the mobile revolution catches up, here are five inherent advantages of mobile retargeting over the desktop:
- Wider reach and better user engagement – A desktop user is not always online, but a mobile user mostly is. In addition, mobile comes with dual channels – website and apps. With the right retargeting partner, who has a wide mobile publisher network across both these channels, you can have phenomenal reach into the user’s online time. For example; you can retarget your mobile app user who has looked at flights from Sydney to Shanghai on both mobile web and mobile apps available on his device. This reach can be supplemented with superior user engagement technologies such as deep linking, event logger available for in-app mobile retargeting.
- Instant connectivity – Features like ‘click-to-call’ are effective on mobile devices as they allow users to connect with your business over a phone call paving the way for higher conversions. Consider a typical scenario where a user clicks on a classified ad and lands on the product page to gather the lister’s contact details. Instead, a ‘click-to-call’ ad allows the user to click on the ad and call up the product lister offering a faster, easier and effective means to connect. Considering the short attention spans displayed by mobile users, click-to-call ads help reduce the conversion cycle spans and deliver greater results.
- Location-based retargeting – The mobile device always travels with the user, so user geo identification (through privacy compliant mechanisms) can supply meaningful insights into the user’s interests and shopping patterns. This data can be utilised for mobile retargeting, gently reminding the user about the pending purchase. For example; consider user X who left your mobile website after looking at watches. Armed with this data, a mobile ad for discounts on watches at your retail store can be shown when user X is in your store’s vicinity. The purchase cycle that took off on your mobile website can be completed at your store traversing the online to offline journey – a feature only mobile retargeting can offer.
- Single mobile user – Desktop might be used by multiple users for online activities, whereas mobiles are mostly single-user devices. How does this impact retargeting? Retargeting, as you know, involves identifying a user’s purchase intent through his browsing behavior and then showing relevant ads across the internet. When multiple users visit your website through a single computer, the user behavior derived will be a combination of all these visits. The purchase intent identified in such cases could be erroneous, if attributed to a single user. But mobile is often perceived as a personal device and used by a single user enabling accurate user profiling and targeting.
- Generates better responses and returns – Mobile users have proven to be more responsive when compared to the desktop. Anytime access to internet could be one of the reasons for this behavior. Campaign trends indicate that mobiles generate higher and faster responses to ads and promotions. One of India’s leading e-commerce advertiser has observed 3 per cent higher conversions attributed to mobile ads than desktop.
Mobiles are proving to be the user’s preferred device for online transactions. However, it is important to remember that despite mobile’s growing popularity, users have not abandoned the desktop completely. The result is a multi-screening user who treats your desktop and mobile assets as a single entity. As the lines between marketing through various channels begin to smudge, it is essential to evolve a unified approach for identifying users across multiple devices to understand the user’s purchase intent and mobile will no doubt have a bigger role to play in your marketing agenda in the days to come.
