AdMob: The Future of Mobile Advertising & Mobile Analytics

Last Friday, Google won approval for its $750 million acquisition of AdMob, one of world’s largest mobile advertising platforms.  AdMob claims to serve more than 7.1 billion mobile banner and text ads per month across mobile websites and handset applications. Since Apple announced a new mobile advertising platform, iAd, earlier in April, it seems that the two biggest mobile giants are looking to increase their mobile advertising.

About AdMob

AdMob is a mobile advertising marketplace that connects advertisers with mobile publishers. It allows advertisers to create ads, choose landing pages and carefully target their ads to specific users. With AdMob, ads can be targeted to locations, carriers, phone platforms, and phone manufacturers. In this way, AdMob allows mobile web site owners and app developers to monetise their mobile traffic and increase the value of their products.

Mobile Advertising & Advertising with AdMob

Unlike traditional web advertising, some special features of the mobile can make some advertising on the platform more effective.  Mobile internet ads consist of test and graphics, and offer the target consumer a variety of response options. A simple click-through, for example, may reach a product registration page, or there may be a click to call option initiating an outbound call to a call centre. Also, a click to buy is a possible route, with a mobile internet purchase appearing on the consumer’s phone bill or iTunes account.

With AdMob, mobile advertising becomes very easy.  You can create a campaign with a selected period and budget like you would in Google AdWords.  The advertiser can choose the products they want to promote: website, application, media, or location and utilities. Each section provides different campaign target options. For instance, if you want to promote an Android application, you can target ads by mobile manufacturer, geography, network operators, and even demographics. The final step is to upload your creative ads to AdMob and test them on the targeted mobile.

Mobile Analytics & Analytics with AdMob

Mobile analytics is a hot topic for companies seeking to innovate in a new channel for their products, extend their brand, and advertise to a wider audience. Many web analytics vendors have offered mobile measurement capabilities. And a few companies provide specific solutions for mobile analytics. However, there are still many measurement challenges in this area.

The first problem is data collection. Javascript is a common method used to collect data in web analytics today, but most mobile phones don’t support it. Secondly, it is hard to identify unique visitors due to lack of cookie support and the fact that mobile IP addresses are unreliable. If you use different mobile analytics tools to see unique visitors in the same period, you will find a huge gap between the two different tools. Similarly, geographic information is one of the most important metrics in mobile analytics but it’s also hard to identify.  That’s because not all devices enable geographic detection because the gateway’s IP address is used, not a GPS signal.

AdMob provides a free mobile analytics service. It uses server side tracking code instead of Javascript to collect data. So when a mobile device requests a page from the site, the server with tracking code will pass analytics related data to AdMob.  With AdMob analytics, you will know the visitors’ details such as their location, their device, and their level of engagement with the site.

What’s next?

I believe that mobile advertising will be very different in the next few years with the ‘new’ AdMob and iAds. I would not be surprised if AdMob was integrated with other Google products such as Google Analytics in the future.