Mobile Advertising: The Anti-Cookie Diet.

By Ismalis Mendoza – Marca

Tracking cookies are an interactive market’s best friend. Marketers use them to keep tabs on users, and it’s how users’ behavior, geography, interests and searches are identified. The information tracking cookies provide is crucial for successful interactive advertising campaigns. Based on that information, marketers can make optimizations to campaigns to ensure they get close to, meet and/or exceed their campaign goals. Mobile advertising challenges interactive marketer’s because it is the anti-cookie diet.

There is no way to use tracking cookies on mobile devices like you can on internet browsers. There is a multitude of reasons for this. Data storage plays a key role in making cookies ineffective. When users close the browser all their data is lost. Mobile phones don’t have a high capacity for storage, and that makes information obtained from cookies unreliable. Also, mobile phone browsers don’t have fixed IP addresses. Mobile providers share IP addresses and these addresses can change from user to user at any moment. All of these reasons play a role in making mobile adserving the wild, wild west of adserving.
Mobile adserving is possible, but it can yield discrepancy rates as high as 40%. There are also certification issues between publishers. It’s hard to find publishers that are certified with all of the major adserving companies. With all of these challenges, how does a mobile advertiser launch campaigns that are successful and measurable?

Mobile advertising will force a marketer to go back to basics. The first step is you really have to know your target and try as much as possible to gauge their mobile consumption habits. Marketers really have to know the inventory they purchase, because there is a lot of dead inventory out there. Mobile social media sites are a prime example of publishers that look like a great idea because your target is constantly interacting on them but in fact can contain a lot of dead inventory. Marketers really have to make their publishers their “BFF.” The information they have will most likely hold the key to the campaign’s success. Publishers can help you make better decisions when it comes to targeting campaign and optimizing campaigns. They know their inventory best, and they can help you understand who is consuming, at what times, at what rate, what carriers they are on and what headsets they use. This information is golden because it gives a marketer some of the information that a tracking cookie would provide. With all interactive campaigns, testing will assist you in obtaining more answers so marketers shouldn’t be afraid to take risk.

Marketers shouldn’t shy away from mobile because of lack of cookies. There are plenty of ways for them to obtain the information they need to be successful. Besides, with the way that technology moves and changes, someone out there will develop the tools needed to make mobile tracking easier and a lot more reliable.

Ismalis Mendoza is a graduate of Boston University, Bachelor of Science in Communication. She has previously worked at Zenithoptimedia handling Hewlett Packard for the Latin American region. Additionally, she also worked at Universal McCann handling their online advertising initiatives for MasterCard, Texas Tourism and GM and the Hispanic Group as a Digital Media Strategist handling the mobile and online display advertising for DishLatino. Ismalis currently works as Media Supervisor at Marca where she handles PNC Bank and Norwegian Cruise Lines for the Hispanic market.

Source: http://www.groundtruth.com/mobile-cookie-crumbs