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iPhone Worst Smartphone for Mobile Advertising

Apple’s iPhone has ranked as the worst smartphone for mobile advertising clickthrough rate according to online advertising network Chitika.

The company monitored 92 million online marketing impressions in September, of which nearly 1.4 million impressions (1.5 per cent) came from searches on mobile phones. Of the five major operating systems measured, which included Google Android, Windows CE, Palm OS and BlackBerry, Apple’s iPhone had the poorest clickthrough rate.

The Palm operating system was ranked the highest of the five contenders, with a clickthrough rate just below 0.90 per cent. The iPhone could only muster a third of Palm’s success with a clickthrough rate of 0.30 per cent. Apple’s iPhone represents 66 per cent of the mobile browsing market, meaning many ads are seen but ignored by users.

Overall mobile marketing fared poorly compared to its standard online advertising, with users half as likely to click on an advert on their mobile as they would from a computer. Chitika’s results show that non-mobile users achieved a clickthrough rate of 0.83 per cent, whilst the combined smartphones managed just 0.48 per cent.

Chitika admitted that the results were somewhat biased in favour of non-mobile users, given that the adverts being compared were the same ads on different media. “The ads displayed on mobile devices are the same as the ones displayed to non-mobile, rather than comparing standard online advertising with mobile oriented ads,” the company wrote in their blog.

Advertisers should not be put off the idea of mobile marketing just yet then. As Stuart Dredge wrote in his commentary for Mobile Entertainment: “So in fact, a better headline for the research might be “mobile and iPhone users not so keen on ads designed for desktop browsers as people using desktop browsers”. Not quite as snappy, I grant you, but a more accurate representation of the company’s survey.”

Mobile and Video Advertising news posted by Lily Townsend on 14 September 2009

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