
How to advertise mobile apps efficiently
Mobile app advertising refers to ads made with mobile devices in mind. It’s rapidly becoming a prevalent tool for brands to succeed in acquiring more customers. Back in 2019, it took over TV advertising. Most mobile users have recently been spending a lot of time on their smartphones rather than on TV.
The percentage of mobile users
The percentage of mobile users may vary depending on the country. For example, in the US, mobile users account for about 55% of total internet traffic. Based on what the World Advertising Research Center stated, billions of people now use the internet via only their smartphones. That’s equal to 51% of all mobile users worldwide. It was further forecasted that, in five years, 72% of all internet users would access the internet solely via mobile devices.
With the above data in mind, here are two questions you may want to ask yourself:
- What percentage of your publicizing is focused on mobile users?
- What percentage of your publicizing is for mobile devices (smartphones and tablets)?
Even if you frequently use paid traffic geared toward mobile users, you shouldn’t forget about ASO. This way you can unlock the full potential of advertising traffic, creating perfect conditions for organic growth.
How to start: Use of ASO
App Store Optimization (ASO) is an enhancement tool for optimizing mobile apps necessary to boost rankings in search results of app stores like App Store and Google Play, the app visibility, and, consequently, the number of installs. Search engine optimization expands the app visibility, which helps bring in more users. Visual optimization makes the app page more attractive, which influences the conversion to installs. This is true for both organic traffic and ad traffic.

ASO is not a cure-all solution. It’s a part of the process, just like testing, product development, and traffic procurement. It’s important to understand that abandoning ad traffic in favor of ASO can be a wrong move. You may want to use both ASO and ad traffic to make it to the top search results.
ASO and UA tests combined may reduce ad procurement costs, as more users will install your app after they click on an ad. You may want to start with ASO; anyway, we believe that a comprehensive approach is important, namely a well-thought-out marketing strategy and a comprehensive ad campaign.
How to keep going: Efficient mobile advertising strategies
Mobile users aren’t always willing to look at ads on their devices, and they often use diverse ad-blocking services. Hence, it’s important to win them over with pertinent ads that would hold their attention efficaciously. Below are the foremost effective mobile advertising strategies:
- Targeted ads: This strategy involves the use of ads that are extremely customized for mobile devices, because each user is limited by their mobile device. Targeted advertising is important to make sure there is growth in mobile conversion.
Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) enhances your ability to do that. It can help you create a variety of ad banner versions and adjust them specifically for the target audience variables like age, geolocation, or socioeconomic status.
- Mobile-preferred ads: Such ads can be targeted toward users who access the internet via mobile devices. You can redirect users to your mobile landing page, prepping them in advance that the URL is mobile-friendly. With those ads, you will need to set a limit with certain offers only accessible via mobile devices.
- E-commerce mobile ads: Most people like it when online shopping is quick. You could use this to your advantage by creating e-commerce ads for mobile devices that allow mobile users to gain as much information as they need to make a satisfying purchase decision.
- Ad extensions: Ad extensions are very helpful in making extra links to your website, special offers, and discounts, as well as other relevant information that can attract more people and boost your CTRs. They can help boost your standard score and your ad ranking too.
- Enabling Calling: By doing this, get ready to reduce the impediments for your prospective customers to call your business. Consequently, by adding your business phone number to the ad, you’ll make it easier for your target audience to reach you and communicate whatever issues they might have without delay, which eventually improves the customer conversion.
- Mobile ad gamification: This is another way of increasing organic conversion. You can implement ad gamification to complement your ads and make them a lot more grounded.
- Ads incentivizing: This strategy involves incentivizing your ads, or, in other words, introducing discounts, free shipping, or voucher options to your ads. Offering a percentage discount for opting in for your newsletter can serve as a good example here.
Wrapping up
With a large increase in internet traffic and the mobile app users desperately searching for relevant digital news and engulfed in playing games and using video or streaming services, an efficient strategy is a necessity.
Switching from desktop to mobile advertising could be a fundamental solution, because the mobile internet is our future.
This guest post is based on the experience of the SEM Nexus company, an app agency focused on building and marketing startup mobile apps.