A look towards the future & what’s to come for mobile

Adjust explore how automation can evolve mobile advertising by allowing brands to iterate on creative and automate bids

While mobile’s rise has been stratospheric, it has also bred intense competition: consumers now have 5 million apps to choose from between the Apple App and Google Play stores combined. Regardless of vertical, marketers are increasingly vying for consumers’ attention - not just to encourage app installs, but also when it comes to in-app advertising. This means optimising campaigns and creatives is more important than ever before.  

But anyone involved in the optimisation process will know how tedious the work can actually be, especially considering how many campaigns individual brands run simultaneously. A survey commissioned by Adjust highlights the scale and complexity of the average campaign: we found that marketers handle an average of 19 campaigns across approximately 14 advertising networks. That means adjusting over 250 bids and spend limits every day. This becomes even harder when you consider the amount of platforms and dashboards involved in campaign management, meaning marketers need to spend a considerable amount of time acquiring, cleaning and organising data before they can start to make sense of it. 

However, we’re starting to see mobile marketing undergo a major evolution, with more and more advertisers enhancing their operations through automation. In fact, we believe that automation has the potential to revolutionise the marketing industry, helping with everything from segmentation and personalisation to analytics and messaging. 

Two areas where we see automation having the most potential are iterating on creatives and for automating bids. 

Personalisation is key to effective marketing, but the sheer number of variables required to reach every user in a meaningful and individual way makes it impossible - at least without automation. At the moment, most marketers still need to upload creatives and check their performance, one by one, on multiple network dashboards. But certain tools can now aggregate this data, freeing up hours of time each week. Marketers can then quickly iterate on creatives by seeing which perform best, and then create similar concepts to the top ones. This also massively increases the amount of campaigns one person can manage, allowing smaller teams to compete with larger marketing departments.

When it comes to implementing bidding automation, marketers can configure the system according to the results and information they require. Say if day seven retention rates from a certain network are less than 10%, marketers could set a rule to pause the campaign. Or, if day seven return on ad spend is more than 40%, increase bid by 10%. This moves spend from underperforming campaigns and creatives to those that are driving results. By adjusting bids based on conversion and CPA (cost-per-action), machine learning means algorithms can also learn over time and suggest CPAs for you. 

Ultimately, automation frees up marketers to do what they were meant to do all along — strategise, think creatively and get ahead of the competition. The mobile marketing industry has come a long way in recent years, and we’re looking forward to seeing how much further it can go as more brands reap the benefits of automation tools. 

Find out more about Adjust here.