U.S. mobile ad revenues will grow from $13.3B last year to $42.4B by 2019. That’s according to BIA/Kelsey’s latest Local Media Forecast, released last week. The forecast is broken down into media such as online, television, and YP. Today we highlight the mobile piece.

The mobile projections above include search, display, SMS, video and native social (i.e. Facebook news feed ads). The latter are the fastest growing mobile ad format. It’s also important to note that these figures do not include tablets (for reasons mentioned here).

In addition to ad formats, the mobile ad pie can be segmented by targeting scope: Location targeted mobile ad spend will grow from $4.3 billion last year to $18.2 billion in 2019. That equals about a third of overall mobile ad revenues, growing to 42 percent by 2019.

Drivers for this growth include mobile usage (which skews towards local intent) and advertiser evolution to follow that usage. Another important factor is the premiums associated with location targeted ads, which result from performance and growing demand.

We’ll release more data soon that drills down further into the mobile numbers and many inputs. Also expect more from the forecast’s other media types as we unpack them here and at upcoming conferences. Meanwhile the mobile highlights are below.

— U.S. location-targeted mobile ad revenues are projected to grow from $4.3 billion in 2014 to $18.2 billion in 2019 (34 percent CAGR).
— This is defined as mobile advertising targeted based on a user’s location; or including proximity-relevant content to trigger local offline conversions.
— It includes large national advertisers and SMBs.

— National advertisers continue to drive the majority of localized mobile ad revenues
— Innovation among ad networks and ad tech providers (e.g., Google, xAd) will accelerate this draw to location targeted mobile ads.
— SMB adoption — a slow but growing share of localized mobile advertising — will likewise impact revenue.
— BIA/Kelsey sees evolving SMB savvy and propensity to self serve with offerings like Google AdWords and Facebook (pull).
— Local media companies will also accelerate adoption through innovation, sales and bundling efforts (push).

— Localized mobile ad share will also grow as a result of premium ad rates.
— Premiums will result mostly from higher performance (i.e., CTRs, phone calls, store visits).
— Performance deltas are in turn a function of:
— Higher relevance, immediacy and alignment with consumer local buying intent, all of which are more prevalent in mobile than in other digital and print media.
— For example, half of mobile searches have intent to find local information or products, compared to the 20 percent of desktop searches that carry comparative local intent.
— Advertisers increasingly include calls-to-action to capture this high local intent (i.e. in-unit click-to-call buttons).

Read More…

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In local media and advertising, “National” is increasingly where it’s at. Though paradoxical in a semantic sense, it stands to reason if you consider the deeper pockets and more technologically adaptive nature of national brands, compared to SMBs.

This is especially true for multi-location businesses such as chain restaurants or retail. Though they’re national in scale, they compete at the local level where conversions happen. We’ve reported that national brand spending will represent 43 percent of location based advertising by 2018.

This involves an evolving set of campaign components including mobile, social, search, listings management, etc.. These strategies are are endemic to local marketing but take unique forms for the nuances of multi-location businesses and how they’re oriented.

We’ve covered this “National” area of local marketing for years but began to formalize that coverage last year. Now we’re blitzing the topic even more, with the upcoming National conference in March in Dallas. And today’s white paper is the latest.

The report’s executive summary is below and BIA/Kelsey clients can read the entire thing by logging into the client portal. Anyone else interested in the full report, please email me (mbolandATbiakelsey.com).

Executive Summary

Smart phones now account for 75 percent of mobile subscriptions according to BIA/Kelsey. Stemming from their evolving capabilities (i.e. location awareness, connectivity, optics), location targeted mobile advertising continues its rapid ascent. BIA/Kelsey projects it to reach $19 billion in the U.S. this year.

Google supports these findings, reporting that 80 percent of smartphone owners search for local information, and 80 percent of those users want ads customized to their locale. Moreover, 73 percent of mobile searches result in conversions (such as calling a business). Half of those happen within one hour.

BIA/Kelsey forecast data and insights likewise indicate that mobile users are “high intent” customers who often have a sense of immediacy (read: ready to buy). Correspondingly, mobile ad networks confirm performance deltas — such as higher click through rates and phone calls — for location targeted ads.

But the emergence of mobile has also made advertising more complex as the technology and consumer behavior evolve. For example, advertisers’ affinity for proof of ROI and attribution is technically difficult when consumer decision-making happens across several devices including desktop, tablet and mobile.

This challenge is amplified for national companies that must align brand messages with local presence. Those localized entities include retail partners, franchisees, distributors, and affiliates. This makes it difficult to achieve consistent messaging and service levels across geographically disparate entities.

These challenges are highlighted by the size of the market opportunity: National brand spending will represent 43 percent of location based advertising by 2018 according to BIA/Kelsey. That’s about $68 billion — an amount that makes multi-location marketing strategies increasingly critical.

Some of the areas where these strategies will focus include social media, listings management, ratings and reviews, search engine optimization, and of course, mobile. This report examines each of these areas and their impact on multi-location advertising in the mobile age.

The post Multi-Location Advertising in the Mobile Age: A New BIA/Kelsey Insight Paper appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

32 percent of mobile ad spend in the U.S. is from location targeted campaigns, according to BIA/Kelsey forecast data. But a question that keep coming up is how much of that is from SMBs, as opposed to national companies (brands, agencies, etc.), that do location targeted mobile advertising?

We examined this question at our September SMB Conference in New Orleans (video below). The answer: less than 10 percent. That can be expected, given mobile advertising’s still-nascent status, and the fact that SMBs tends to trail larger advertisers that generally have more resources and savvy.

But interestingly, this SMB share will grow to one third by 2019 — thus approaching the 36 percent SMBs hold in overall location targeted advertising. In other words as mobile local advertising matures, it will resemble the split seen in the overall local media pie (YP, radio, TV, online, etc.).

The SMB mobile adoption itself will come from 1. their own natural evolution to self serve, which is in turn supported by available tools like Google’s Enhanced Campaigns. 2. The efforts of local media companies like YP and Yelp to better push mobile advertising, and make a stronger case for it.

See the video below for more. We’ll continue this discussion and many others at our Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media conference, only 2 weeks away in San Francisco. Hope to see you there.

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According to our newly released LCM wave 18 data, SMBs find that call-based leads tend to be of higher quality than email (where SMBs reported 43% to be good/excellent), Facebook (35.3% good/excellent) and even in store visits (58.8% good/excellent). Between those SMBs that found call-based leads to be of “good quality” (33.2%) or “excellent quality” (35.5%) that’s an astonishing 68.6 percent. What does this mean? Increasingly, phone calls are becoming the bread and butter lead-type for the vast majority of small businesses.

This has led to a lot of interesting and complex challenges for marketers that service SMB campaigns – with the most pressing issue being how to attribute offline calls that came from online campaigns back to the campaigns themselves. Dynamic call-tracking numbers have been able to solve this problem partially, but still don’t provide the depth of analytics that are necessary to create the highest return on investment for marketing campaigns.

This is where companies like Invoca come in. Until recently, SMBs have had a difficult time tracking the digital path a consumer took that led to them placing a phone call. Essentially, once a person calls into a business from an online campaign, they would switch from online to offline and would appear “new” to the business. Existing marketing automation, retargeting, and CRM software platforms often go blind once this transition takes place.

Invoca and other call analytics platforms have developed solutions to bridge the online-offline call intelligence gap, and have been able to equip marketers with the necessary data and insight needed to maximize marketing campaign ROI. We recently sat with the Invoca product team to learn about Signal, their new phone call analytics solution designed to assist businesses with connecting keywords and campaigns to phone calls – layered with contextual data that aids in analyzing the content of the call in real-time.

A key element of the tool is dynamic session-based tracking. In the event a number changes from one campaign to the next, the customer will still be remembered and identified from the last time they clicked through and called. Once the call occurs, the software creates or links to an existing profile, attributes information related to the call, then allows for data dips into third party solutions, then finally routes them to another sales department based on a lead scoring and routing automated metric system.

Signal takes the context of the call a step further with sentiment analysis after the call has been connected and a conversation has begun. Pairing these two types of data while connecting it with keywords from the online campaign provides SMBs with interesting call attribution capabilities.

Call-based leads will continue to be the gold-standard lead-type for SMBs as mobile devices and mobile search continue to boom. We expect the interest/demand for call intelligence and analytics solutions like Invoca’s Signal product to grow as marketers continue ride the mobile-call wave.

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The latest in our series of video presentations covers the basics of location-based mobile advertising. This takes a 40K foot view of the trends impacting this opportune area.  For example, what’s driving the $4.5 billion spent annually on location targeted mobile ads?

Other Topics Covered:

— What usage patterns are having the most impact on location based advertising?
— What do we mean exactly when we say “location based mobile advertising” (examples)?
— What campaign tactics are producing the greatest results so far?
— mCommerce vs. offline shopping (spoiler: offline is where it’s at)

Check out the presentation below — a carbon copy of one I gave last week at LeadsCon. It contains streaming video of slides and voiceover. Consider it a “conversation starter” for deeper dives, and the topics at our upcoming SMB Digital Marketing conference.

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Push alerts are becoming an increasingly important flavor of mobile marketing. This has culminated from lots of mobile macro factors like the sheer size of app marketplaces, and the competition for active engagement from increasingly fleeting users.

This has caused the “app fatigue” phenomenon and high drop-off rates. One counter attack has been to make it easier for users to get content without even opening the app. This was the battle cry of Foursquare’s Radar — one of the first to utilize native push alert functionality in iOS.

Since then, the art of push has evolved. A good example is what Find&Save does to push location targeted messaging around opt-in deal alerts. We wrote about that app a few months ago, and the discussion around push alerts recently continued in a webcast I did for Mobile Marketer.

The video (slides and voiceover) can be seen below. It takes a case study-driven approach to illustrate best and worst practices in delivering mobile content around the quickly developing push paradigm. That includes Find&Save, Google, Tesco and others.

Anyone in the world of mobile marketing that’s building knowledge about push alerts should watch the whole thing. For those with more casual interest, skip around to the various case studies.  And if you want copies of my slides, email me (mbolandATbiakelsey.com).

The post From the BIA/Kelsey Workshop: A Crash Course in Mobile Push Alerts appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

BIA/Kelsey has released the latest wave of its U.S. Social Local Media Forecast for 2013-2018, and unsurprisingly, the two drivers accelerating advertising spend are mobile platforms and native formats.

The overall social advertising market will surge from $8.4 billion this year to $15 billion by 2018. That same year native will account for nearly two-thirds of all social advertising ($9.4 billion), and mobile will represent more than half of it ($7.6 billion). Native social advertising revenues will eclipse social display next year. Meanwhile, mobile will reach a similar inflection point with desktop in 2018.

Of course the two trends are closely correlated. Mobile use of social networks continues to grow, and as it does, the networks are building monetizable mobile-first experiences. Those ad concepts are predominantly (and in many cases exclusively) native formats that integrate in-stream into organic content.

Take Facebook as a prime example. In just over a year, the company has activated a non-existent mobile advertising business into now more than 50 percent of total revenues. This number will continue to escalate. The formats driving this growth are entirely native News Feed ads.

Compared to mobile and native, location-targeted social advertising is growing less dramatically, as many social platforms have been slower to introduce high-performing local solutions (i.e. more granular geo-targeting). Some still offer only brand advertising. However, BIA/Kelsey still projects locally-targeted social ad spend to grow from $2.4 billion this year to $5.2 billion by 2018, a 31.6 percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate). This projection could be lifted in future waves as a greater push into location targeting is made and more small businesses onboard.

BIA/Kelsey clients can access the full forecast here.

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It’s that time of year again; BIA/Kelsey’s spring release of its local media forecast. This is broken down into its media components, such as Online, TV, Yellow Pages, Mobile, etc… The full forecast will be out in a few weeks. Today we release the first component: Mobile.

Part of the Executive Summary and charts are below. The top-line takeaway is overall U.S. mobile ad revenue growth: $7.2 billion last year to $30.3 billion by 2018. That includes search, display, SMS, video and native social (i.e. FB news feed ads). The latter caused us to dial figures up from last year.

Zeroing in on the forecast’s main theme of location targeted mobile ads, those went from $2.9 billion last year to $15.7 billion in 2018. That makes them 40 percent of overall mobile ad revenues, growing to 52 percent in 2018. There are lots of reasons for that, some of which are outlined below.

Lastly, it’s notable that this forecast release coincides with today’s IAB release of prior year online and mobile audits. It’s good to see accuracy in their figures, especially the mobile numbers which I believe due to parity with the figures I devised. Their $7.1B is just shy of our $7.2B.

To engage over these numbers or for a full copy of the forecast, email my colleague Steve Passwaiter. And we’ll be discussing these figures in greater depth during our Leading in Local conference next month in Atlanta. Email me directly for a discount code at mbolandATbiakelsey.com.

Executive Summary

— Location targeted mobile advertising — the centerpiece of this forecast — is included within total U.S. mobile advertising (see slide 22 for this breakdown).

— To understand the localized portion requires first panning back to the total mobile ad revenue picture. Here, BIA/Kelsey projects revenue to grow from $7.2 billion in 2013 to $30.3 billion in 2018. This projection has increased from our previous forecast (November 2013).

— Increased projections result from guidance from mobile ad networks and ad share leaders such as Google (33 percent of paid clicks now come from mobile devices); and Facebook (53 percent of ad revenues attributed to mobile, up from 23 percent last March).

— Google’s Enhanced Campaigns*, launched in July, will compound these factors by forcing mobile ads on search advertisers (default campaign inclusion). This will accelerate a mobile advertising learning curve and adoption cycle for all search advertisers, including SMBs.

— Enhanced Campaigns will also notably close the current gap between mobile ad rates and desktop equivalents (rates are demand-driven).

— This will play out as an influx of advertisers in Google’s bid marketplace for mobile keywords will naturally boost bid pressure and thus CPCs. There is shift is already underway, evidenced by data shared with us by search marketing agencies.

— The share of the overall mobile ad revenue pie attributed to location based campaigns will grow from 40 percent ($2.9 billion) in 2013 to 52 percent ($15.7 billion) in 2018.

— This share shift remained fairly consistent from our previous forecast, as the factors driving localized mobile ad adoption have remained steady.

— These factors include advertiser demand, higher ad performance for location targeted ad campaigns, and resulting increases in mobile ad rates (CPMs, CPCs).

— Other important factors driving this localized share include the adoption of mobile local advertising tactics (i.e. geo-fencing, click-to-call, click to map) by national advertisers, who account for most U.S. mobile ad spending.

— SMB adoption — a slow but growing share of localized mobile advertising — will likewise impact its growth.

— For national brand advertisers, the shift to location targeted mobile advertising will be driven by their natural evolution to adopt effective, increasingly available, and currently undervalued mobile local ad inventory.

— Innovation among ad networks and ad tech providers (e.g., Enhanced Campaigns) will provide additional incentive and impetus for this transition.

— For SMBs, the sector’s digital media adoption traditionally lags behind national advertisers due to lower levels of tech savvy, budget, time and human resources.

— However, SMB-driven growth is expected throughout our forecast period due to evolving SMB savvy and growing propensity to self-serve with offerings like Google AdWords and Facebook (pull).

— Also at play will be the accelerating mobile innovation, sales and bundling efforts of local media companies (push).

— As an example of the push paradigm, Yelp last month partnered with YP. The publisher’s 4,000 local sales reps will now be armed with Yelp advertising packages, which include mobile presence and distribution.

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It’s been a busy few days for Twitter since announcing 15 New Types of Ads to users’ feeds. Word has traveled quickly during this period of uncertainty around Twitter’s sustainability as an advertising player. Now Twitter has continued the flow of news by announcing this morning it will acquire Cover, an Android-based lock-screen app. This extends the social media giant’s mobile ambitions.

Cover is a lock screen replacement that provides users with quick access to apps based on a contextual information and user history. For example, Cover will fill the lock screen with email, Instagram, Twitter and news apps because those are the applications that are checked first in the morning. The app utilizes data it learns for prior usage and behavior to predict which applications will be used in a given moment.

Cover has yet to specify what the acquisition means for the company but Twitter’s current crop of promoted advertising products haven’t resonated with mobile game and e-commerce companies. These entities’ advertising decisions are driven by app downloads and purchases Cover may be an answer to that problem. Twitter also has been testing a mobile-app install ad product as well. It is similar to the popular Facebook product which has been successful in pulling mobile advertising revenues.

In fact, this move parallels to what Facebook has done with Home, in carving out user engagement on the home and lock screen. That effort has been somewhat anemic so far for Facebook , but Twitter clearly sees some opportunity in a parallel effort.

Cover’s post-acquisition future could involve revenue through application discovery and promotion. Twitter could leverage the app by suggesting third party apps for the right occasion that users haven’t downloaded or purchased yet. Coupled with Twitter’s geo-targeting capabilities it could suggest apps based on nearby events or or other geographically relevant tie-ins.

Twitter has always possessed some aspects of “mobile-first” (140 characters is born from carrier-dictated SMS character limit). Through last week’s new ad products and today’s acquisition, it further cements itself as mobile player. Through this, we’ll see Twitter to ratchet up the share of ad it dollars — currently 75 percent — coming from mobile

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