• by Ben Frederick  @mp_benfred, August 19, 2015

AdTheorent, a mobile ad network that supports real-time bidding (RTB), released a report this week detailing their Q2 mobile ad performance in the travel and tourism vertical.

The company tracked user engagement across 177.7 million mobile impressions using a predictive modeling platform with a focus on the travel and tourism vertical.

The platform also analyzed secondary actions, including viewing mobile brand videos, visiting a company Web site to learn more about a product, actions signaling travel intent, or social shares.

Anthony Iacovone, AdTheorent CEO, says that his company’s campaigns are run on machine learning, as opposed to traditional behavioral modeling, allowing them to form predictive models and generate microsegments, or groups of top performing users.

For example, one segment is single women with no children who make over $225,000 a year and enjoy foreign travel and have been on a cruise in the last three years. This segment, while hyperspecific, had a 200% higher engagement than the industry average.

Consumers spent an average of 21.01 seconds interacting with the rich media units, which was 59% higher, it claims, than the industry benchmark. Iacovone attributes the high engagement levels is due to the accuracy of the microsegments generated by the platform.

Users on Wifi networks were 40% more engaged with ads compared to users on cellular networks.

Mobile apps also performed much better than the mobile Web, it found, with business apps delivering 519% higher engagement than entertainment apps.

The states that performed best in the report included Minnesota, Texas, Kansas, North Dakota and South Dakota, three of which are fairly sparsely populated.

The top device for ad engagement was the Kindle Fire.

eMarketer expects that mobile will make up half of the $4.85 billion digital ad spend in the travel industry in 2015. eMarketer also estimates that programmatic now accounts for 68% of U.S. digital display ad spending by travel marketers.