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The number of native advertising campaigns based on mobile devices has tripled in size, according to a study by native advertising platform Adyoulik
It showed that in 2014 mobile-only spend accounted for 10% of spend but the share tripled to 30% in 2015. Mobile-only has stolen share from desktop-only which fell from 40% in 2014 to 15% in 2015. Half of the spend in both 2014 and 2015 covered all devices.
The conclusions come from the analysis of 1.3 billion in-feed native ads run in the UK during 2015 and is claimed to be the first year-on-year analysis of native advertising trends looking at advertiser, publisher and consumer behaviour for the 2014-15 period.
Headlines without a brand name mention were four times more likely to be pursued than those that did
Last year saw 81% of publishers running native ads on mobile. The figure compares to 62% the previous year.
The research also showed that native ads on mobiles are generating marginally more attention than before. The average dwell time in 2015 was 2.4 minutes, up from 2.2 minutes in 2014. Dwell time on desktops meanwhile has remained constant at around the 1.1 minute mark – more than half the time spent on mobile.
“It’s clear that mobile and native are a match made in heaven,” said Francis Turner, UK managing director of Adyoulike. “Native ads provide quality content, which consumers demand, delivered in-feed in a way that doesn’t spoil the mobile experience,” he said.
Turner also questioned why nearly 20% of publishers still don’t offer native advertising on mobile. “With more and more people focusing on mobiles as their primary way of going online, in-feed native ads are going to become increasingly important,” he said.
The research also looked at what persuaded audiences to click through. It found that more than half (53%) of ads with character lengths of up to 40 characters were clicked through in 2015 compared to less than a third (32%) the year before. For headlines of between 70 to 90 characters click through rates more than halved – down from 36% to 17%.
The mention of brand names in a headline also proved to be off-putting. Headlines without a brand name mention were four times more likely to be pursued than those that did – up from twice as likely in 2014.
Brand are also having to work harder to create specific digital content with the number of native video ads that were simply a re-hash of an existing TV ad down from 90% in 2014 to 78% in 2015.
“It may well be the influence of mobile that made ads with shorter headlines even more accessible and successful last year,” said Turner. “There’s also a possibility that consumers are getting switched off by listicles or click-bait titles with overlong titles – and they’re clearly not happy with pushy brand mentions clogging up their feed,” he said.
During 2015 one in six native campaigns were already being run programmatically – thanks largely to the impact of the OpenRTB 2.3 programmatic standard on the native advertising market, according to Adyoulike.
