As mobile advertising grows, you need to be smarter to win. And if you want to be smarter, you need data and insights.
This is why we’ve produced our Global AdMetrics Report for Q3 2012, which builds on previous reports to give advertisers and publishers alike insight into what’s driving mobile advertising and how to plan accordingly.
The Global AdMetrics Report is drawn from all the activity across our smarter buying platform for the past quarter. If you want to read the report for yourself you can download the full Q3 2012 Adfonic Global AdMetrics Report. Then make sure you come back here and let us know your thoughts.
This is what we found in Q3 2012.
Apple is winning the Apple v Samsung two-horse race
There are two great debates raging right now: the wider conversation around operating systems, between Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS; and a more recent one around manufacturers, namely Apple and Samsung. This is only partly driven by the mutual legal actions they’ve been undertaking: in our mobile advertising platform, the figures really do show that Apple v Samsung is a two-horse race.
In Q3 2012, Apple and Samsung devices dominated Adfonic’s platform for share of ad impressions. Apple occupied the top two positions, with its iPhone and iPod Touch devices accounting for 29.3% and 4.8% of ad impressions globally. Samsung took seven of the top ten positions with its Android-based Galaxy range of devices.
So it was interesting to see that, while Apple and Samsung both increased their share of ad impressions globally, Apple widened its lead over Samsung in Q3.
(pp=percentage points)
Apple’s share of ad impressions increased from 34% in Q2 to 37%, while Samsung’s increased from 23% in Q2 to 24%. This meant that, while Apple and Samsung both increased their share of global ad impressions quarter on quarter, Apple actually extended its lead by 2 percentage points, to 13 percentage points.
This was despite Samsung making huge inroads in terms of device ownership, and popular devices such as the S3 becoming widely available in July this year. In Q4 we will start to see the effect of several new Apple devices on the mobile advertising inventory, such as the iPhone 5, the new iPad and the iPad Mini – which itself will go head-to-head with Samsung’s hotly anticipated Galaxy S3 Mini.
So we look forward to Q4 with a great deal of interest to see how the device race has changed. All bets are on.
New mobile devices experienced rapid adoption
When we looked at the top ten device league tables by ad impression, we noticed that some new mobile devices were already up there despite having only launched, or become widely available, during the quarter.
(pp=percentage points)
For example, Samsung’s Galaxy S3 made it into the global top ten mobile devices by ad impressions, reaching sixth position with 1.4% of all impressions despite only becoming widely available in July 2012.
Google also experienced rapid adoption in North America, with its Nexus tablet 7 achieving tenth place in that region, and accounting for 1.4% of the region’s total impressions within five months of its June 2012 launch (download the full Global AdMetrics Report to see North America and other regional details).
If these can affect the top ten so radically, it will be even more fascinating to see the new Apple and Samsung devices come on tap next quarter.
Real-time Bidding (RTB) provided huge uplift for buyers and sellers across all channels
RTB is the means by which mobile advertising achieves something of the fluidity, scale and dynamism of financial markets, with bidders able to apply huge amounts of data to decisions around whether or not to bid for each and every ad impression on the market, within milliseconds. It uses big data and smart algorithms that simply were not possible until recently.
With the theory of RTB widely accepted, and the practice performing for online display advertising, in Q3 Adfonic was able to show that RTB really does perform. For both advertisers and publishers alike, RTB provided significantly stronger results across every Adfonic channel.
The channel with the strongest RTB performance was Social Networking, which generated clickthrough rates (CTRs) of 127% more than the average for non-RTB inventory, and effective earnings per thousand impressions (eCPMs) 663% higher than the average for non-RTB.
The next strongest performing channels for buyers were Entertainment, with 82% higher CTRs, and News, Sport & Information, with 71% higher CTRs.
Here at Adfonic we truly believe that RTB will emerge as the dominant way to buy mobile media, especially when tied to the direct and broad access enabled through Demand-side Platforms (DSPs) such as Adfonic’s Madison.
If you want to be part of RTB, and are interested in transparency, control and efficiency in your mobile advertising buying, find out more: meet Madison, our DSP.
And if you want to read the report for yourself – all 38 pages of it – you can download the full Q3 2012 Adfonic Global AdMetrics Report. Then, as we said at the top of the post, make sure you come back here and let us know your thoughts.