Genuine VC: Where Mobile Advertisements Roam
Good post by David Beisel at Masthead Ventures on the impact of mobile advertising on operations, he’s riffing off of Rafat Ali’s observation that mobile advertising will need mobile friendly landing pages.
“All advertising eventually leads to some type of commerce transaction. However, there’s a spectrum along which advertisers fall that covers how immediate the transaction occurs. On one end, there’s metric-driven performance-based advertising which measures it success directly by whether or not commerce happens immediately (or in the trackable near-future). On the opposite end is brand advertising, which supports the general perspective and attributes of a brand, so that eventually a constituent who sees an ad influences a future purchasing decision, either individually or as part of an organization. And then there’s everything in between, where the ad isn’t direct response per se, but is still aiming towards a transaction sometime in future, to varying degrees.”
David is referring to the need for commerce advertisers to track, from first click through, the lifetime value of a visitor from consideration to commerce conversion across multiple sessions. For large ticket purchases (like notebook PCs), the customer is generally flipping in and out of the vendor site multiple times, seeking prices, reviews, and competitor information before ultimately committing to the sale. This is a matter of persistent cookies and smart metrics.