Mobile phones have become the one-stop destination for consumers-right from wake up calls to urgent shopping needs, instant messaging, etc. Naturally, this gave the rise to mobile advertising as a prime channel for marketers to communicate with their audience. With the advancing developments in the digital space, marketers need to stay on top of the latest technology and trends. But when it comes to mobile advertising, marketers are still using traditional KPI metrics such as viewability and clicks to measure success on mobile adverts. Sadly, this doesn’t help convey the full value of mobile advertising.

A new study commissioned by Forrester Consulting, on behalf of Yieldmo, highlights how adopting customer attention metrics can help deliver the full value for mobile advertising and achieve results.  The study defines customer attention metrics as every discrete behavior a consumer exhibits on their mobile devices to signal involvement while looking at an advertisement — like swipes and tilts. These inputs are able to add more insight into the mobile ad engagement. But before diving into the insights of the study, it is imperative to understand the two prime objectives when it comes to mobile advertising. Mobile marketers focus on one of the two objectives:

1. Driving a conversion action (Direct response or DR)
2. Communicating brand values to the consumer

While mobile has generally been considered as a DR channel, brand building is slowly catching up and that means marketers will require more detailed metrics to understand how to build both brand and demand.

According to the study, fewer than half of marketers are very confident in measuring detailed mobile ad metrics, such as conversion rates or brand lift metrics. Yet even these decision-makers struggle to identify which specific customer attention metrics they are tracking or how they use them to optimize their mobile campaigns. The majority of marketers – 57% to be exact are able to measure the metric of brand safety confidently.  However, when it comes to a metric such as brand lift which is the increase in interaction with a brand, only 27% are able to do so. Such challenges tend to harm the business.

Over the next five years, mobile advertising will account for approximately 97% of incremental display spend globally, which means the gaps in mobile performance measurement will only become more visible and more problematic. According to the study, the prime challenges marketers face as a result is the inability to satisfy their customers and drive customers efficiently through the purchase life cycle.

As a result, marketers are more eager than ever to explore new approaches to help improve their understanding of mobile advertising in order to create more optimized ads and satisfy customers. Nearly 80% of marketers are very or extremely interested in more effective customer attention insights, and 63% plan to invest in customer attention metrics for their brands.

98% of respondents believe that attention metrics would drive value for their organizations. 65% of respondents said they would use attention data to retarget inattentive consumers,  62% said they would pursue enhancing click-through rate by retargeting attentive customers, and 55% would enhance sales by retargeting attentive customers.

As more and more consumers draw their attention towards mobile, brands are under pressure to modernize their technology and approach to better serve these customers lest lose them to a competitor within the blink of an eye.