InMobi, a leading provider of monetisation and marketing technologies that help businesses fuel growth, today (November 20th, 2023) released insights from a joint study with Advertiser Perceptions, the leading provider of research-based strategic market intelligence to the media, advertising, and ad tech industries, demonstrating that brand advertisers are increasingly adopting performance KPIs for their campaigns.

When it comes to mobile advertising, actionable business outcomes such as driving sales via mobile apps or app instals have become equally important to brand advertisers, creating a new hybrid KPI and blurring the lines between what performance and brand marketers typically seek in return for mobile campaigns. The study showed that 40% of brand-focused advertisers emphasised app instals and driving sales of specific products through their mobile app. Meanwhile, 40% of performance advertisers want campaigns to also deliver brand awareness along with performance metrics, such as reach and frequency.

“Performance advertisers in this study were concerned with the fact that users are becoming less responsive to traditional banner ads. Addressability and attribution are important problems to solve for advertisers, but so is the overuse of banner ads without specific goals,” says Nicole Perrin, vice president, business intelligence, Advertiser Perceptions.

Advertisers list their top campaign concerns as identity-related challenges, most notably tied to app tracking transparency and third-party cookie deprecation. Three in four surveyed say audiences are a top reason to partner with a mobile exchange rather than an omnichannel exchange for in-app advertising, followed by supply path optimisation and identity. Two-thirds of these advertisers prefer to buy mobile in-app inventory from mobile-first experts on performance.

“The general consumer malaise around banner ads, or ‘banner blindness’, has been a long time coming and marketers must continue to shift to higher impact immersive creative and engaging formats,” says Kunal Nagpal, chief business officer, InMobi Advertising Platform. “In-app formats like in-feed, rewarded, and instream ads provide dynamic, user-centric, and personalised advertising experiences. Coupled with advanced targeting and buying efficiency, in-app ads offer a compelling choice for advertisers looking to evolve their planning even during this evolutionary period of signal loss.”

For half of brand-focused advertisers, mobile in-app video is part of their broader video strategy. More than half of marketers cite desktop web and social platforms as budgets they would re-allocate to fund mobile in-app video ads. 

Advertiser Perceptions conducted 150 online interviews with senior marketer and agency executives for this survey in Q3 2023. The population included advertising decision-makers in the United States with an annual spend of USD$1mn (£80mn) or more and over USD$100k (£80k) annually on mobile in-app. The top industries represented by respondents to this study included financial services, CPG: food and household goods, and apparel/fashion. All marketers self-selected as digitally focused and mobile-first, with connected television (CTV) and digital-out-of-home (DOOH) as secondary channels.