Holiday 2014 demonstrated mobile’s increasingly crucial role in retail marketing, accounting for more than half of retail searches. But marketers continue to fly blind with direct offers made to shoppers, especially in the CPG arena, where customer data from retailers can be difficult or even impossible to come by. Now out comes the ad platform 4Info with a benchmarking report it claims pries open the lid on mobile’s effect at retail.
It found that mobile campaigns drive more than double the sales that desktop campaigns do. Mobile executions produced about $30 in sales per 1,000 impressions versus only $13 for desktop, with average return on ad spend for mobile hitting 257%. The study focused on 83 mobile campaigns in seven CPG categories over their entire durations, with the average being 11 weeks.
The benchmarking was performed using Nielsen Catalina Solutions, which integrates Catalina frequent shopper data with Nielsen homescan to derive results representative of national activity. “This is the first time such benchmarks have been available to mobile advertisers,” says 4Info CEO Tim Jenkins. “This is causal data that represents exactly what’s happening in-store.”
Jenkins says the study addresses the two most pressing needs of mobile advertisers—how to scale addressable audiences across mobile screens and how to calculate resulting offline sales.
