Mobile Web Monetization methods: display vs app promotions?
99% of website publishers today have mobile web pageviews, whether they like it or not. It’s commonplace to see anywhere between 20–40% mobile traffic of phone and tablet browsers Some publishers even report 50–60%. This is not a surprise, as according to various credible sources out there today, mobile web is averaging about 28% of the total web traffic out there. By the way, generally speaking there is more internet traffic on mobile, way more. Most of it goes to apps, yet mobile web is still retaining about 15–20% of the traffic, where about 80% goes to apps, according to the latest studies.
So what can we do with this traffic that we have, coming into our site? Normally, a good media display deal will net us a sizable chunk to take home, earning us well into the single digits dollar eCPM if done right. But how can we monetize our mobile web traffic effectively? On mobile, there are already a lot of good solutions out there if you’re willing to consider testing them out.
On such solution is utilizing the power of a performance advertising network and placing a display banner on your site. Popular formats include a 320*50 or similar sizes, which run at the top of bottom of your site. You can also turn them into a “catfish” format and have them become a ‘sticky’ part of the screen, persistently there, as it were, never leaving the view of the user. Alternatively you can also insert splash screen, full screen formats at the entrance to the site or even between pages. This is considered quite intrusive yet yields an effective revenue. Be mindful of your users and consider their appreciation of your content — try balancing out bounce rates vs monetization.
Another popular solution these days is promoting selected apps or app discovery content. Many networks on mobile today promote app discovery as a healthy alternative to display. This works by offering the user several apps to install, and earning a bounty. The added value here is they you can often refresh the content with the most relevant app for your users, and tailor the offer and creative copy materials in order to better convert.
If you have significant content on your site you should also consider monetizing from cross promoting content with networks of content discovery which help users also relate to the content offered, and often convert naturally with the readers intent.
Whichever you choose, never settle for an intrusive approach to compromise your user experience and try to isolate the impact of these approaches to the overall site performance. If you already have google analytics in place, be mindful of bounce rates, time on site, and events per user. If you see significant changes to these metrics, never settle for an easy explanation and find a way around it. Here’ some metrics you should consider when looking at performance, along with useful resources from around the web:
- Average ecpm’s by device and banner size. see this, or this. none of these will explain it all, and no one completely adresses the issue of mobile web. but these should serve as a baseline for the past years.
- Useful mobile performance networks as alternative: definity media, matomy mobile,say media and many more can be found here.
- App discovery networks — appnext, clicksmob, and many many more.
- Popular content promotion networks — Taboola, Outbrain, and even google is coming out with a solution soon!
