How to Advertise on the iPhone

We just placed an ad on an iPhone app for a client and found the process relatively simple. Mobile advertising is still in its early stages and so I have found this to be limiting in certain areas such as metrics and animated graphic etc. Of course, being an Apple device, flash is not an option.

Is a Mobile Ad Right to Reach Your Audience?

Before you start going down this route though, it is important to determine if a mobile app is right for your audience. The way we did this was to take a look at our website analytics. If you use Google this process is simple. Log in to your account, on your analytics dashboard view click “Visitors”, then “Mobile”, “Mobile Devises”. You’ll then be provided with a screen that shows visitors to your site from various mobile devices. Locate “iPhone”, iPod” and “iPad” rows and look at the number of visitors. At this point you will be able to see how many potential customers/clients could possibly see your ad via their phone. Obviously the user will have to have the specific app to see your ad, not just have the device. The visitor number will just give you an idea of the number of your customers who have the device. It’s up to you as to how many visitors will warrant your investment into an ad program for the iPhone. It is advisable to look at the percentage of total visits on the mobile devices rather than actual numbers. Because every industry is different, some websites convert higher than others, so for these sites, a lower volume of visitors would be perfectly acceptable for an iPhone ad program.

Here’s the process we used to get an ad up and running on a couple of relative apps:

1. Research – Find an app relative to your industry, one that you think your prospective customers or clients may use. They must have and existing ad platform in place for their ads (check to see if they have any ads on their app)
2. Contact the app creator and ask them about their ad program. Find out how they track impressions and clicks and any other metrics you would like to know. Note that unlike websites, where impressions are the number of times your ad is displayed, your app ad provider may not be able to get as specific as that. In those occasions they will likely be able tot ell you how may times the app is accessed per day. To calculate the effective impressions, you will need to take the number of opens and divide it by the number of advertisers that rotate in your placement. This will obviously not give you an exact number since if someone spends a lot of time on the app, they may be subjected to your ad in more than once depending on number of advertisers. That said, the number of app opens will give you a good idea of your exposure.
3. Negotiate a price – You can base this on your knowledge of web banner advertising. Just remember that apps are generally not accessed as much as popular website, so you will have less exposure but can be more focused on a specific niche, depending on your industry and app that you are advertising on.
4. Create the ad – Ad mentioned earlier, the ad formats appear to be fairly limited to a static image. These generally have pixel dimensions of 320 x 50 as a common size, but may vary from app to app. You might want to talk to your app vendor and see if you can supply two versions so that you can do some split testing and determine which type of ad content is more favorable for your app viewers. For example, one add might promote “free shipping” another might promote that you are a “green/environmentally friendly” company
5. Create tracking urls – I use Google’s UTM service as documented in a previous post, then you can monitor your traffic specifically from your app advertising campaign.
6. Submit your ad creative and tracking url and you are ready to go!