Mobile Advertising Facts 2015

The great thing about mobile or digital advertising is that you can gather and correlate huge amounts of data with little effort. With this data, you can find some pretty interesting things about how mobile advertising is growing, and what it looks like in its current form. The reason for this is that digital advertising, and especially mobile advertising, relies heavily on data to provide more accurate, targeted results, so data is constantly being collected and stored away for future reference.

In this article, we take a look at some mind blowing mobile advertising facts that are relevant to 2015.

Global Mobile Ad Spend is Huge (And Still Growing)

If you’ve already dipped your toes into the ocean of mobile advertising, you’ll know that it’s an ever-growing beast. In 2012, a reasonably large $8.76 billion was spent on mobile advertising, and at the time this amount showed the world just how powerful mobile could end up becoming for marketers around the world. Fast forward two years and the 2014 global mobile ad spend was reported to reach $31.45 billion.

It’s estimated that global mobile ad spend will reach $45.85 billion by the end of 2015, and $94.91 billion by 2018. That’s over 900% growth over a 6 year period.

As expected, Europe took charge of most of this growth in 2014 with a 46.8% regional growth rate, whilst the USA and UK were behind with 34.4% and 22.6% growth rates respectively. Strangely, Australia had a minimal 8.3% growth rate, whilst Japan’s growth was just 0.1%. These kinds of trends are expected to continue through 2015, especially in Europe where mobile advertising has seen a huge increase in popularity.

CTR is Higher On Smartphones and Tablets

Marketers aren’t just spending huge amount of money on mobile advertising either. In fact, click-through rates for smartphones and tablets were seen to be higher than the same desktop advertising formats in 2014.

For search, an average global click-through rate for smartphones was 2.81%, and tablets were close behind with 2.34%. The desktop was lagging behind both smartphones and tablets with a 2.09% average click-through rate. Part of the large gap between desktop and mobile CTR may be to do with the changes Google has made to make it easier for advertisers to reach out to mobile searchers through promoted app store links and more mobile-friendly content.

However, it was the same story with social advertising, and smartphones saw a global average CTR of 0.60%, whilst desktop average click-through rate was just 0.42%.

Finally, display advertising saw a 0.36% and 0.32% average global CTR for smartphones and tablets respectively, whilst desktop display CTR was just 0.24%.

Mobile Growth Continue to Power Advertising Trends

It’s no surprise then that the continued mobile growth we’ve seen over the last few years has helped to power many advertising and marketing trends across the globe. In 2015, mobile penetration is expected to grow, and we’re looking at finally hitting the 2 billion active smartphone user milestone this year. Tablet active users is expected to hit 1.2 billion.

On top of this huge milestone, click share for search, display and social ads on mobile devices is expected to hit and surpass 50% in 2015. This will mean that by the end of 2015, over half of all ad interactions via search, display and social media will be made from either a smartphone or a tablet.

This information is great news for anybody looking at investing in mobile advertising. There’s no doubt that mobile advertising in 2015 is only going to grow alongside the mobile and smartphone user base. Desktop advertising is still very useful this year, but there’s absolutely no way you can turn a blind eye on smartphones and tablets now that they take such a large chunk of display, social and search advertising.