Gone are the days when advertisers or marketers had to part with upfront fees without knowing if their marketing campaigns would ultimately be successful in line with their business goals.
Performance marketing has changed the game. The keyword here is ‘performance’ in that the advertiser or marketer only pays the ad network upon successful transactions, whether that is a conversion or a sale. Intrinsically, targeting and real-time monitoring of ad campaigns is at the heart of performance marketing ensuring that campaigns work to meet very specific goals.
As campaigns are highly targeted toward a specific audience, tracking and monitoring down to the click is entirely possible and when done correctly results in win-win situations for the ad network and the advertiser.
In the world of advertising and performance marketing, things have become more interesting following the domination of mobile. According to Google reports, over fifty percent of searches are conducted via mobile devices and with a close to universal rate of mobile penetration, it has become much easier to reach consumers anytime and anywhere they may be.
Even then, trends such as ad blocking and continued changes in Google’s search algorithm has made mobile marketing all the more competitive for marketers. Success in today’s mobile marketing environment requires avoiding costly mistakes such as the ones below:
1. FAILING TO HYPERLOCALISE
Once upon a time, the goal for business was to go global. Today, smart marketers are finding and keeping their best customers in very local settings such as on the street next door, the neighborhood, the town and the in the city.
Mobile devices offer marketers the opportunity to almost identify their customers’ near exact location. Surprisingly, just 22% of mobile marketers deliver highly targeted location‐based ads to consumers in very specific, narrowed down locations.
What can you do about it? There are numerous tools at your disposal to aid in delivering hyperlocal ads, whether that is Twitter Search, MeetUp, Facebook ad tools, FourSquare and others, it has become much easier to reach the ‘nano market’ that is likely underserved by the Fortune 500 companies.
2. NOT CARING ABOUT DEVICE TARGETING
Are you creating similar campaigns for Android and iPhone users? If you are, you could be leaving money on the table. iPhone users are characteristically different from Android users and vice versa.
By collecting data on the tendencies of these different groups of smartphone users, a marketer would be better placed to deliver ads that resonate with the needs of the user, for example, based on their pattern of activities at specific times of the day or their search behaviour. It is not enough to repurpose ad creative for these two user groups; different devices have different requirements for delivering creative that is engaging to your target audience.
Today’s consumer is highly dynamic in the way they access the internet, browse and buy‐‐ they are constantly interchanging devices. Success with performance marketing calls for the marketer to apply cross‐device marketing strategies to be able to reach highly qualified prospects across all their devices. The result? Better targeting, more business and impressive returns on your ads spend.
3. NOT FOLLOWING UP WITH APP INSTALL OFFERS
There is no denying that the apps market is not only flooded but is also mercilessly competitive. According to 
eMarketer, marketers using apps for business purposes have little choice but to pay for install app campaigns to increase app install volumes. Indeed app install ad revenue is estimated to grow to $7.1 billion by 2020 in the US alone.
A major mistake app marketers make is stopping at the app install campaign and failing to follow up on post‐install events, which really are critical indicators of a customer’s life time value.
Yes, an app install is a commendable indication of the success of a campaign up to a certain point. However, 84 percent of smartphone owners frequently use just five of the apps they download; the rest of the apps downloaded remain largely dormant. Beyond installing an app, there are other actions you would like your customers to undertake but these key conversions cannot happen if you fail to follow through with the app install offers in your campaign.
Key conversions or post‐install events such as in‐app purchases and application upgrades are after all, the primary factors influencing your business bottom line.
Mobile Performance Marketing Works
[easy-tweet tweet=”Mobile is the present frontier of digital marketing.”]
Smart marketers today understand that driving sales, check‐ins or new installs is not about shelling out loads of money on expensive CPI and CPC campaigns. When done right, mobile marketing that is focused on performance and measurable results can help you grow a steady bottom line in an increasingly mobile and increasingly competitive business landscape.
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