First Steps in 3rd party Mobile Ad Serving

Innovation is a remarkable thing. It has completely energised the digital marketing industry every couple of years in a Moore’s law fashion and, after each breaking wave, a surge of demand follows for the ad server to support the latest trend. Mobile is a trend making more waves from a technology perspective than your average slinky. Last week, I presented at an Interactive Advertising Bureau, UK (IABUK) conference on the position of mobile ad serving today – a snapshot of the challenges we are facing as an industry and some technology offerings which have floated to the surface.

To get a full spectrum view of the mobile advertising industry I began my content-collecting journey by speaking to a handful of publishers, including our own Microsoft publisher team for mobile properties, before catching up with some folks working on mobile at Google. The results were insight-provoking but helped verify that, as an industry, our concerns are universal and collaboration is king.

When bringing a PC/Mac-based solution to the mobile environment, we have a maze of challenges to overcome to return data that is both accurate and consistent with the data sets reported by the mobile publishers. Today, all ad servers are seeing some range of discrepant figures in campaigns when trying to bring together the full picture of the user journey in the path to conversions. After all, the ideal is to understand if advertising media dollars spent in the mobile space provide a clear return on investment, or at least, uplift on conversions for dollars spent elsewhere in digital. If we are used to seeing a persistent user tracking across time and publishers on the PC, doesn’t it also make sense to prevail for persistence and obtain clarity for user behaviour on internet-enabled devices as well? In pushing for this early in the lifetime of this technology, these figures, in some cases, escalate disappointingly above the standards set and expected by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), meaning that, at a deeper level, either new standards need to be introduced specifically for mobile, or more rigorous testing needs to be conducted by all parties present in the digital marketing chain.

It is no great feat to see why capturing data from a mobile device may be a much bigger challenge than tracking via the PC- or Mac-based browser. The mobile space is prone to: 

• Non-standard mobile ad formats; which build a vastly complex tagging requirement for the media agency to manage
• Multiple browser types, firmware types, and devices; processing data in unexpected ways and conflicting with server calls
• Different screen sizes and URL length quotas; cutting off redirects so some users never reach the landing page
• Mobile carrier data limits and signal strength; cutting ad server data calls short
• Limited Flash support; additional calls required for the ad server to determine the right format to deliver
• Cookies are unreliable; ad servers must find a new way to map legacy version cookie IDs to a new generation of identifiers
• Ads in mobile applications; a new delivery space with limited standards means unpredictable ad behaviour
•  Faced with a growing number of devices and configurations, the ad server’s challenges to deliver ads and track grow alongside.

Ad servers differ in the methods used to deliver creative and tracking solutions to the mobile space, but, in essence, there are two approaches. The first is to adapt the existing PC/Mac-ad serving solution to serve to mobile, using existing technology for a new medium to find the right technology mix to eradicate inflated discrepancies. The second approach is the partnership school of thought.

Through the Atlas Technology Partner Alliance (ATPA), Atlas enables the advertiser or media agency to continue working with their preferred specialist technology providers. These flexible, best-in-breed providers bring a wealth of expertise, tools, and insight that is invaluable to the campaign and is a more comfortable and trusted position for the parties involved. In the mobile space, it is of primary importance to overcome the vast majority of challenges, while retaining a holistic reporting view across all channels.

In both methodologies, there continues to be a small percentage of campaigns where discrepancy is prominent and the full user journey is clouded by the black box of an application environment or the hurdles provided by diverse devices. As a technology provider among a pool of providers experiencing the same challenges, we appeal to both the patience and collaboration of publisher and advertisers. We want to be transparent: there is work ahead of us to make sure that, as we reach ubiquitous consumption of the standardised smartphone, we eradicate discrepancy, and complete ad-driven user pathways from mobile devices to the bigger picture of digital marketing as a whole.