Brendan Smith, CEO of mobile ad network, Motive Interactive, offers three tips to win the mobile advertising ‘Gold Rush’

The mobile advertising landscape is evolving rapidly to the point where marketing is a constant learning process. While that general statement may be of little surprise to some, this emerging medium has been changing at such a pace that it’s akin to the “gold rush” we saw in online marketing 10 years ago.

The issue today is the need for marketers to shift their focus in mobile to quality over quantity as they now have in other digital channels. It’s important to know not just the amount of reach you have with a targeted audience, but also how you are reaching prospective users, how they respond to campaigns and how they interact with you afterwards. So before spending one cent on a mobile ad initiative, look to ensure you have these three “must haves” in place.

The right ad network
As a general rule, the best performance ad networks are ones that generate their traffic sources by invitation only. In other words, their marketing partners have been appropriately screened to provide quality consumers that will be more responsive to advertising campaigns. Often times, ad networks are open to anyone without conducting much in the way of due diligence.

The best ones go a step further by maintaining an intimate relationship with the traffic sources to assure they can customize to fit their clients’ needs. What’s more, the traffic provided to advertisers is typically done without offering direct incentives to consumers for downloading mobile applications.

Conversely, some networks allow incentive tactics to drive user acquisition to apps. While traffic will significantly spike for a particular app with this tactic, it must be done with great caution as the individuals who respond to such calls to action may be more interested in the incentive than the actual product being advertised. Retention – and revenue – could suffer as a result.

All of this leads to a better definition of “mobile performance marketing.” The concept must not only include the financial metrics where a payment for marketing services is triggered when a user downloads the app, but also:

• How those individuals interact with the app
• Where do they spend money if at all
• What is the final monetary value of the user
• How profitable is the customer after considering the front end cost to acquire them

These types of networks that take “performance” to this level are ones that can provide quality traffic for advertisers.

A clear and valuable user experience
The advertiser must know what they expect to gain from the campaign. The more information the campaign manager can provide the ad network along these lines, the better the odds of success. That’s because understanding the end state will help drive what kind of interaction is best to elicit the intended response.
Sharing the backend goals and the specifics of the strategy with your network will lead to better user acquisition performance.

Know your numbers
At the end of the day, a mobile campaign is no different than an online or, for that matter, a traditional advertising initiative. Setting specific goals, sharing them with the network and conducting a proper analysis during and after the campaign are things that will help build a better campaign that delivers decent results.

There’s more. Just because the traffic is high quality, doesn’t mean it’s going to work for your campaign. Testing and analysis are important parts of the puzzle. Figuring out how that quality traffic interacts with your mobile ad or product and optimizing it based on the data you receive can increase conversations for future spend with those same traffic sources.

Mobile marketing is an increasingly crucial element to a successful digital campaign. The increased ability to target specific audiences as well as their precise locations at any point in time is a gold mine to organizations that wants to generate more returns for their dollar. Yet while the platform can arguably be the most effective outlet for marketers, no mobile initiative will succeed if the right network isn’t selected, the user experience is not good enough, or the goals not well defined.

Brendan Smith is co-founder and CEO of Motive Interactive