The 5 Best Mobile Ad Targeting Tips For Your Business

Understand Your Mobile Audience, Create A Target Audience Description, & Select The Mobile Ad Types Most Likely To Make Your Mobile Ad Campaign A Success

Between two-thirds and nearly-90% of businesses believe that their efforts at mobile app ad targeting and other types of mobile audience targeting are effective. Yet the average firm’s mobile ad campaign revenue has been shrinking steadily over the past five years (at least).

What’s more, recent research suggests that, for most businesses, the revenue increases as a result of using “privacy-hostile” mobile ad types in pursuit of their target mobile audience are just 4% greater than they would have been, had the ads been un-targeted. That statistic, alone, is enough for many experts to suggest that the most productive mobile advertising trends in 2020 may have more to do with respecting privacy, tasteful retargeting, and running contextual ads for mobile apps and devices.

Mobile Ad Targeting Tip #1: Successful Mobile Ad Targeting Requires Respecting Users’ Privacy Concerns

For the majority of mobile users, data mining and online privacy are increasingly important considerations for (and before) engaging with any site or app. Consequently, when users see targeted mobile app ads and other behaviorally-based mobile ad campaigns that seem overly informed by their personal data/information, they’re not flattered or motivated to make a purchase; they’re unsettled and tend to judge the associated brands as either predatory or unsafe.

Mobile Ad Targeting Tip #2: The Extent Of Your Mobile Audience Members’ Anxiety Depends On Their Demographics

Some mobile audiences are more concerned about data privacy and more unsettled by targeted mobile app ads and other behavior-based mobile marketing campaigns. Generally speaking, about 83% of mobile users are concerned about their privacy online, and more than one-quarter of an average mobile audience will avoid engaging with ads that appear to (or explicitly) use their personal data to target the ad content. Yet men are more likely to find targeted mobile app ads and other behavior-based mobile ad campaigns off-putting.

Mobile Ad Targeting Tip #3: Gauge Your Mobile Audience Members’ Loyalty Before Running Specific Promotions Or Mobile Ad Types

One often-overlooked element of any mobile audience member’s demographic information is their level of brand loyalty. That’s because consumers with high levels of brand trust are more likely to respond positively to ads for any kind of product (new or previously purchased). In contrast, mobile audience members who have a low level of brand trust are more likely to respond well to discount-focused (rather than previous-purchase-based) ads.

This mobile advertising trend makes a loud statement about the effects of making behaviorally-based advertising moves too soon during your relationship with a customer. This subverts advertisers’ historical understanding of the relationship between brand loyalty and personalization; now, it seems, seeing targeted mobile app ads or other behaviorally-informed mobile ads can damage brand credibility if users do not have pre-established trust in it.

Mobile Ad Targeting Tip #4: Use Novel Tools For Defining Your Target Audience Description, But Don’t Always Leave The Mobile Ad Campaign Creation To Automation

There’s nothing wrong with developing a strong, clear target audience description. Even outside of behavioral mobile site and mobile app ad targeting, understanding, and being able to paint a detailed picture of your mobile audience is a critical part of successfully bringing a business online.

As a result, some of the best tools available to any developer or business owner for defining a target audience description are social media based audience targeting spaces (like Facebook’s audience management suite). Learning to leverage these tools to learn as much as possible about the search patterns and purchasing decisions of your people is important, yet that doesn’t always mean you must use that information to create targeted ads. After all, targeted mobile ad campaigns in non-social-platform spaces can prove to be as much as 500% more expensive than non-targeted ads. Plus, automated ads created with these tools can prove to be among the most “creepy” and “invasive” ads users see.

Mobile Ad Targeting Tip #5: Take Advantage Of Growing Mobile Advertising Trends In Contextually Targeted Mobile Ad Types

By far the fastest-growing mobile advertising trend is the use of location-based mobile ad types. This — along with mobile ad types that are informed by context (like the app being used or item being searched for/viewed) rather than cookies — is an important departure from how businesses have focused on targeting their mobile ad campaigns for the past decade. It also presents unparalleled opportunities to enhance mobile ad campaign effectiveness in partnership with geolocated social media marketing and by driving ad viewers to brick-and-mortar stores.