Advertisements on apps receive over twice as many clicks as those on the mobile web, according to a benchmark report by mobile ad-serving platform Medialets.

The report into mobile and tablet advertising covers the first half of 2014 and analyses over 300bn data points from mobile campaigns within that period.

Among the insights discovered by the report was the fact that consumers spend 58.2 per cent of their time in apps, compared to 41.8 per cent on the mobile web. Ads served in apps showed a CTR of 0.56 per cent, compared to 0.23 per cent on mobile web.

Broken down by vertical, retail utilises mobile advertising the most, with 37.9 per cent of ads, followed by technology, business & finance, and consumer packaged goods. Travel & entertainment, while only 8.4 per cent of ads, delivered the highest CTR, with 0.80 per cent.

Focusing on static format ads such as banners and interstitials, the report found that medium rectangle ads showed the highest CTR across both phones and tablets, while tablet static interstitial ads, although a smaller subset of campaigns, delivered a CTR of 3.27 per cent, a considerable outlier. View-through attribution was found to be a substantial aid to static campaigns, increasing page views by 288 per cent, app downloads by 162 per cent and purchases by 157 per cent.

With rich media ads, phones were served over 10 times as many impressions as tablets, which made up only 8.7 per cent of impressions. Rich media expandables were the most popular format, three times more common than rich banners, with the average expandable kept open for 16 seconds, and 2.8 times more likely to be interacted with on a phone compared to a tablet.

Video dominated rich media ads, with 56 per cent of rich media campaigns including a video element. The importance of placing key messages early in video content was emphasised by the report, which showed that while 80.3 per cent of viewers watched to the third quarter of videos, only 33.9 per cent watched all of the video.