The last time I checked
About 3 months ago I did some work researching the viability of developing a mobile website for one of our key clients. We reviewed the potential traffic we could drive through search plus the total traffic already coming from mobiles.
From the research I found that about 25% of Australians had access to 3G (this doesn’t mean they use it) and this % had grown rapidly since the introduction of the iPhone. However, based on potential mobile paid search & our current mobile visitors we were able comfortably get 1-2% of our total website traffic to be mobile, pretty darn low. So we, and the client, decided to hold of on a mobile site and focus on other digital activities.
A profound Sensis research study
It’s 3 months later and Sensis have released a research report (pdf) by Sweeny Research that indicates that 26% of Australians have accessed the internet from their mobile – a pretty astounding number.So therefore all advertisers should start spending more on mobile…
So I dug a little further
So I jumped back into their 2008 report to see what the change was year-on-year and I was surprised to see that it wasn’t there… weird. At this point I got a bit skeptical and something else popped out at me – Yellow Pages (Sensis) just released an iPhone app of their directory – what a perfect time to release research that tells their advertisers to spend on mobile.
So maybe I’m skeptical, maybe it is finally the year of the mobile (which the mobile industry has been claiming for 3 yers now) or maybe not. I’m just questioning the background, approach and validity of the research. Maybe they should’ve asked “How many times have you accessed the internet via your mobile in the last 12 months?”.
My personal recent experience
In a recent campaign for another client, the media agency negotiated some bonus media with a big publisher, some mobile media. The publisher also offered to build a mobile site for the product, as there was no cost or risk to our client we couldn’t resist.
So we received a bunch of banner impressions and a really nice mobile site and we measured the results. This client has an ROI calculator that helps compare the performance of different media online, it calculates what the value of the media was to the business. So, if we calculated the value of the mobile site and the media provided by the publisher it would’ve been worth about $50 – not awesome at all.
What does this all mean?
Now I love and advocate mobile apps and advertising, particularly considering it’s potential growth with iPhone, Google Android and many others entering the market, and telcos rapidly reducing the cost of data. However, will it currently deliver a strong ROI? Is this the best place to spend $50k? That all depends on your marketing objectives, but for some of my clients I’d say no