India ranked eighth globally on ad requests on mobile devices

According to State of Mobile Advertising report, published by Opera recently, India is ranked eighth globally with respect to ad requests on mobile devices. Overall Asia-Pacific countries make up nine of the top 20 countries ranked by impressions. The region is led by Indonesia in fourth place (after the UK), followed by Japan, India, China and Australia in fifth, eighth, ninth and tenth place, respectively.

The US and Canada generate the majority of ad requests, with 73 per cent of the global total. The eCPM for US is also the highest (US$1.98), closely followed by the UK, Italy, Spain, Germany and France ($1.94).

The report is based on insights from the second quarter of 2012 and summarises the mobile ad platform’s results from serving more than 9,000 global customers with more than 35 billion ad impressions per month and driving more than $240 million (US) of revenue to mobile publishers in 2011.

Commenting about India's eighth position amongst countries ranked by ad impressions, Rohit Dadwal, managing director, Mobile Marketing Association, Asia, said, “The size of the market, the recent surge in mobile penetration, and the availability of more affordable telecom services in the country, as well as various measures put in place by the authorities to reduce spam, which in turn might have restored some measure of consumer confidence in mobile advertising.”

“The report goes on to mention that the eCPM in all other regions of the world excluding the US and EU stands at $1.57. This is much lower than the global average of $1.90. This suggests that mobile publishers in regions such as South-East Asia, India, China and the Middle East should continue to focus on delivering quality content that provides value-added services to customers. As many customers now have the opportunity to consume content from many different types of devices, publishers should support a variety of ad formats. This becomes particularly important in India as there is a wide range of devices being used across the country from the most basic feature phones to the most hi-tech smartphones,” Dadwal added.

Madan Sanglikar, chief executive officer, ad2c, pointed out that the right thing for mobile publishers has been to be at the 'rich' place at the right time. He explained, “Currently, smart phones or tablets cater to the top segment of the population, typically the niche audience referred to as SEC A+. Most brands would not mind paying the right premium to reach this audience. This advantage will be short lived and soon more users across the board will embrace the smartphones and the niche advantage could be lost. So the right step was indeed to create content for the smartphone users and make most of advantages and take the learnings so that as the base increases they can find newer ways of higher monetisation.”

In terms of mobile advertising, the iPhone OS comes out on top with an average eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) of US$2.85 followed by Android devices at US$2.10, according to the report. Based on these results, Opera inferred that devices with better usability and features that allow more interaction between the advertisement and the device’s functionality have better monetisation potential than less user-friendly devices.

“We also see the importance of device market share in encouraging advertisers to target particular devices. Windows phones have most if not all of the advanced features of Android and iPhones, but low levels of user adoption stifle its performance,” said the report.

Opera also found that the iPad delivered an average 3CPM of US$3.96 across the mobile Opera ad platform. This further illustrates the point as the iPad epitomises user-friendly devices and is achieving significant user adoption in user groups that are highly desirable to advertisers. For example, 40 per cent of physicians own or plan to own an iPad or tablet by the end of 2012, according to Nielsen projections.

The study recommends that advertisers make tablet ad executions an important part of their strategy in the next six months.

Rich media is also a key differentiator in driving engagement, said the study. So far in the first half of 2012, Apple’s iOS has delivered a clear majority of rich media ad impressions - correlating to higher eCPM. In addition, according to Opera’s rich media index, 66 per cent of users that click to a video will complete that interaction with an average dwell time of 52 seconds. Photo-taking capabilities warrant an even higher dwell time (1 min 25 secs), and about half of consumers will continue to interact with the ad post-click.

Advertisers have taken note of this. This year, Opera has observed the number of standard and expandable banner executions diminish while HTML5 rich media and video ad executions are increasing.

(With inputs from Campaign Asia)