DATA POINTS: Ad Spending on the Up; Mobile Web Usability Is Terrible; Half of Apple Mobile Devices Are In North America; More Than Half Of Americans Have Accessed the Internet From A Mobile Device
AD BUYING IS TRENDING UPWARD, says a regular tracking report of the “advertising confidence” of media buyers and marketers, from Advertiser Perceptions Inc. The report says that in every medium except local newspapers, advertisers are looking to increase their spending, potentially signaling that the ad market has already bottomed out and is beginning to recover. Additionally, the report says that mobile is the sector about which those surveyed are the most optimistic, followed closely by online. Source
The Bottom Line: As the economy begins to recover, so too will advertising. But that doesn’t mean that things will go back to the same state they were in a year or two ago. The recession and subsequent drop off in ad spending may prove to be an inflection point where marketers shift their spending away from old-media outlets like newspapers, in favor of newer channels like mobile.
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MOBILE USABILITY IS AN OXYMORON, according to a study of mobile web sites from well-known usability consultants Nielsen Norman Group. The company says that the results remind them of their first study of desktop PC sites in 1994, and that user had much lower success rates at completing tasks than on desktop sites.
The group tested 36 web sites, asking users to attempt particular tasks on each one, such as trying to find information about wine on a wine site, or flight information on an airline’s mobile site. They also tested “web-wide tasks” where users could utilize any site they wanted. The average success rate on mobile was 59 percent, compared to 80 percent on PCs, while they also found that users of mobile-specific sites were successful 64 percent of the time, compared to 53 percent when trying to use a full desktop site on a mobile device. Source
The Bottom Line: The results of this study shouldn’t be particularly surprising to anybody who’s spent much time on the mobile web, but it’s also easy to quibble with the methodology and setup of the tests here, in particular how it ignores the use of search on mobile devices. Instead of getting bogged down in the details, save the $200 on the report and take this away: while the mobile web may be improving, it’s still far from perfect, even with ever more powerful browsers. Every web publisher needs to think about mobile users, and consider how best to serve them.
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MORE THAN HALF OF IPHONE/IPOD TOUCH USERS ARE IN NORTH AMERICA, according to Admob’s latest monthly metrics report. 58 percent of Apple mobile device users are in North America, the company says, with 26 percent in Western Europe, 7 percent in Asia and 9 percent in the rest of the world. Admob also says that over the past six months, the ratio of iPhones to iPod touches across its network has remained constant at about 2:1, suggesting the devices are selling in a similar ratio. Admob also says that requests from Android devices are growing by 25 percent monthly, giving it a greater growth rate than Windows Mobile devices for the first time. Source
The Bottom Line: That the majority of Apple’s mobile devices are in North America is a no-brainer, but perhaps the fact that that Europe holds half as many might be a little surprising, given the patchwork distribution of the iPhone there.
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FIFTY-SIX PERCENT OF AMERICANS HAVE ACCESSED THE INTERNET FROM A MOBILE DEVICE, say new stats from the Pew Internet and American Life Project – but two-thirds of those have been on a laptop. Still, the group says that 32 percent of Americans have used a mobile phone to send emails or look at the web, up from 24 percent in December 2007. Nearly a fifth of Americans access the mobile internet every day, up from a tenth in 2007. Source
The Bottom Line: There seems to be a wide range of numbers cited when it comes to mobile internet usage in the US, spanning different services and devices. However, all the reports agree on one thing: numbers of users are growing.
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Tags: AdMob, Apple, iPhone, iPod touch, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Marketing, Nielsen Norman Group, Pew Internet and American Life Project, Usability
