Commentary

The Click Through Rate for Mobile Video Ads Is Through the Roof, Says New Unruly Report

Proof of the rapid growth and popularity of mobile video is getting another piece of evidence today from Unruly, the British-based marketing tech and social video platform that is usually making news reporting on video sharing trends.

Here, it’s zeroed in on mobile devices, reporting that in its most recent worldwide data charting usage over the last year, the click-through-rate (CTR) to a brand’s Website is almost three times higher from a consumer’s mobile device than from their laptop or desktop.    

The stats are pretty startling. The average CTR for mobile campaigns (13.64%) is almost three times that of desktop (5.45%), and what’s more it’s grown by a stunning 265.7% from the fourth quarter of 2012 to the third quarter of 2013, even though CTR has also increased on desktops.

The pace of click throughs on mobile have more than doubled in the last two quarters alone.  

Interaction rates have doubled on mobile in the last year, to 22.64%

Unruly tabulated data from more than 3,000 branded campaigns. It measured performance of both mobile and desktop campaigns against a variety of metrics, including plays, CTRs, interaction rates and replay rates.  

Unruly’s results are consistent with a recent IAB report, compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), that found mobile ad revenues jumped 145% to more than $3 billion in the first half of the year from the same period a year ago.

“It’ a major trend,” says Unruly co-founder and COO Sarah Wood. “Consumers are just much more used to using mobile and advertisers are just so much more used to advertising using mobile.”

Unruly seems to be a huge cheerleader for Vine videos, which, though just six seconds long, can do the job for advertisers, particularly on mobile devices where, she says, “audio can be buggy.” That makes the quick-hit visual nature of Vines appealing, and what’s more she says, visualizing is just more impactful than, say, banner ads.

But it’s not Vine that is solely responsible for the uptick in click through rates. It’s just all-around familiarity with the device, she suspects. As more and more people are getting smartphones, they’re using them more, and quite clearly the inventory of mobile video advertising has grown too.      

The US market is Unruly’s benchmark for the study, since it delivers more mobile views than other nations. In this country alone, the click through rate has jumped from 6.24% to 12.03%  in the same period.

But, Wood notes, an interesting aspect of mobile advertising is its growth worldwide.  Mobile’s impact is more pronounced in some emerging economies than it is in established centers of commerce. She notes, for example, that the click through rate in India for the third quarter was 22.5%.  In part, she theorizes, rapidly developing nations see the use of mobile as a natural part of doing business or being a consumer, not a new wrinkle to be learned. “Emerging economies tend to consume video at higher rates,” she says.

pj@mediapost.com

4 comments about "The Click Through Rate for Mobile Video Ads Is Through the Roof, Says New Unruly Report ".
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  1. Doug Garnett from Protonik, LLC, October 15, 2013 at 10:56 a.m.

    Sounds pretty suspect to me. But there's not enough data here to sort out where they may have cut corners in order to find numbers to build their business.

  2. Mike Einstein from the Brothers Einstein, October 15, 2013 at 12:14 p.m.

    According to a recent Trefis article, Google's avg display-ad CTR = 2%, Yahoo/Bing's = .93%, and Facebook's = .05%. So, Doug, just what part of Unruly's findings do you find suspect? Certainly not the 27,280% discrepancy between their numbers and Facebook's. I just feel sorry for Facebook when advertisers catch wind of this?

  3. Matt Cooper from Addroid, October 15, 2013 at 2:20 p.m.

    Who here is getting a 5.45% CTR on their desktop display campaign? Bueller... Bueller... Bueller...

  4. Doug Garnett from Protonik, LLC, October 15, 2013 at 5:03 p.m.

    Just a wild guess, you know. :-)

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