New Study Shows Brand-Focused and Performance-Focused Marketers’ Priorities Blur for In-App Campaigns

Hybrid “Brand Performance” KPIs Such as In-App Purchase Rise in the Wake of Diminishing Response from Conventional Banner Ads

InMobi, a leading provider of monetization and marketing technologies that help businesses fuel growth, today released insights from a joint study with Advertiser Perceptions, the leading provider of research-based strategic market intelligence to the media, advertising, and ad tech industries, demonstrating that brand advertisers are increasingly adopting performance KPIs for their campaigns.

When it comes to mobile advertising, actionable business outcomes such as driving sales via mobile apps or app installs have become equally important to brand advertisers, creating a new hybrid KPI and blurring the lines between what performance and brand marketers typically seek in return for mobile campaigns. The study showed that 40 percent of brand-focused advertisers emphasized app installs and driving sales of specific products through their mobile app. Meanwhile, 40 percent of performance advertisers want campaigns to also deliver brand awareness along with performance metrics, such as reach and frequency.

“Performance advertisers in this study were concerned with the fact that users are becoming less responsive to traditional banner ads. Addressability and attribution are important problems to solve for advertisers, but so is the overuse of banner ads without specific goals,” says Nicole Perrin, Vice President, Business Intelligence, Advertiser Perceptions.

Advertisers list their top campaign concerns are identity-related challenges, most notably tied to AppTrackingTransparency and third-party cookie deprecation. Three in four surveyed say audiences are a top reason to partner with a mobile exchange rather than an omnichannel exchange for in-app advertising, followed by supply path optimization and identity. Two-thirds of these advertisers prefer to buy mobile in-app inventory from mobile-first experts on performance.

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“The general consumer malaise around banner ads, or ‘banner blindness’, has been a long time coming and marketers must continue to shift to higher impact immersive creative and engaging formats” says Kunal Nagpal, Chief Business Officer, InMobi Advertising Platform. “In-app formats like in-feed, rewarded, and instream ads provide dynamic, user-centric, and personalized advertising experiences. Coupled with advanced targeting and buying efficiency, In-app ads offer a compelling choice for advertisers looking to evolve their planning even during this evolutionary period of signal loss.”

For half of brand-focused advertisers, mobile in-app video is part of their broader video strategy. More than half of marketers cite desktop web and social platforms as budgets they would reallocate to fund mobile in-app video ads.

Advertiser Perceptions conducted 150 online interviews with senior marketer and agency executives for this survey in Q3 2023. The population included advertising decision-makers in the United States with an annual spend of $1 million or more and over $100k annually on mobile in-app. The top industries represented by respondents to this study included financial services, CPG: food and household goods, and apparel/fashion. All marketers self-selected as digitally focused and mobile-first, with connected television (CTV) and digital-out-of-home (DOOH) as secondary channels.

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