A study conducted by Yahoo! and Ipsos has found that mobile advertising is most effective when users are actually shopping.
Findings from the study shed some interesting light on consumer mobile usage. For instance, a third of the total time spent by users on their mobile is at home. Also, content consumption patterns on the mobile Web are starting to mirror that of the PC. Connecting, searching and entertaining dominated mobile web usage
It was found that users spend about 38% of their mobile time to communicate and about half of that time for entertainment or search purposes. In contrast, only 7% of the mobile time is spent on shopping.
This 7% of mobile time that is spent on shopping is most important for advertisers, as it has been found that users are most likely to engage with ads on their mobile phone while they are in the process of shopping.
This finding seems logical, as it can be easily understood that ads might be perceived as a distraction when one is using the phone to communicate with others or even while conducting searches or using the phone for entertainment.
In contrast, when users shopping, they would naturally be interested in seeing what products or services are on offer, before finalising a deal. It was found that users are most likely to recall an ad they have seen while they were shopping. While about two-thirds of users had seen an ad while shopping more than half of them had clicked on the ad.
It has also been found that most users prefer to shop through a mobile browser rather than through an app. In contrast, connecting and communicating is most frequently done outside a browser.
For advertisers, this indicates a need to target messaging appropriately, according to the usage mode.
