So You Want to Get Into Mobile Advertising?

Here’s what you’ll need to know.

We’ve taken on a few interns through the course at CrowdMob, with a variety of areas of focus — MBAs, marketing, advertising, to name a few. However, mobile advertising is so new that most universities are sending out new grads with almost no clue about how advertising happens on mobile; few know even the most basic industry vocabulary.

I’ve put together what I think is the minimum viable knowledge base for anyone going into a career in mobile advertising. It’s the “syllabus outline” of what we at CrowdMob teach to new hires and interns. (Also, if you’re in San Francisco, and want to intern, contact me!)

• End User LTV
  LTV stands for Life Time Value, and refers to how much money an advertiser is making from each of its customers over the entire lifespan of that relationship. This informs how much can be spent by the advertiser for acquiring each new customer.
• ROI / RPI / RPC
  Return on investment(ROI) can come in many forms depending on how the advertiser is specifying its goals. They may be tracking Revenue generated per each install(RPI), or revenue generated by every click on an ad (RPC).
• CPM / CPC / CPI / CPA
  Cost per Mille, which is a thousand impressions (yes, it’s an odd choice), or cost per other action, like a click, or install. Ad networks charge for buying placements on one of these strategies. They inform how much risk the buyer and seller of each ad placement takes on.
• CTR / SIR / Conversion Rate
  Click through rates, store install rates, and conversion rates in general inform how much money was spent on ad placements that didn’t result in any value for the advertiser.
• Viral Coefficient (K-Factor)
  Even most professional marketers forget to compute the additional revenue generated by additional end users referred by an end user acquired via an advertisement. When competing against other advertisers, it’s important to take all types of user revenue into account (even as a result of virally acquired revenue), so that an advertiser can outbid their competitors while remaining ROI positive.
• Charting & Position Download Rates
  A key factor in judging the ROI on a mobile advertising campaign for native apps, is additional users acquired from changes in chart position. Advertisers that are able to factor LTV lift from chart rankings can also outbid their competitors while staying ROI positive.
• DSPs vs. SSPs / Advertisers vs. Publishers vs. Agencies
  Two of the most heavily used acronyms are DSP (Demand-Side Platform) and SSP (Supply/Sell-Side Platform). If an ad network or platform is buying ad space, it is on the Demand-Side; if it’s selling ad placements, it’s an SSP. Agencies are simply the companies that have many advertiser clients, and use the DSP platforms. Publishers work with Supply-Side Platforms to surface their ad spaces to be sold.
• Tracking Networks & SDKs
  Tying an individual ad placement to an eventual click, install, or some other revenue generating event is a technically challenging problem on its own. Other companies, like HasOffers and its Mobile App Tracking product, exist solely to do this tracking. For advertisers with a mobile application, they usually provide an SDK, or pre-built library of computer software, that advertisers embed within their own app to report back conversion events.
• Data Exchanges
  Most advertisers want to buy placements for certain demographics of users, or users with a certain profile. Many times, data exchanges like Blue Kai are used by Agencies and DSPs to target on these parameters.
• Rate of User Growth
  More advanced mobile advertisers care a lot about maintaining a certain rate of growth for their user base. By factoring the attrition rate of their current user base over a period, with the amount of new users they get over the same period, one calculates the overall user growth rate for a period (which can be negative for a lot of companies). Many advertisers use mobile advertising to keep their rate of growth constant, and being able to calculate this is crucial for them.

If you can speak to, and know how to measure each of these bullet points, it’s fairly certain you’ll be able to find a great job in mobile advertising. At the very least, my last round of interns were ☺