In a recent report from Juniper Research, they are predicting that revenue from mobile searches will explode to $15 billion by 2017, which is nearly 3 times the expected revenues for 2012. Not surprisingly, mobile search enjoys some of the highest click-through-rates and cost-per-click rates in mobile advertising.
The future is clearly all about mobile. Mobile searches currently account for about 10% of Internet traffic (up from just 1% in 2009) and mobile monetization is accelerating rapidly. An exciting 71% of the growth coming via mobile applications.
It is rapidly becoming very clear that any advertiser that is looking to get great ROI on their advertising budget should focus on mobile and the mobile Internet.
What is fueling this rapid growth? It’s easy to see, that it is simply a numbers game. As of January, 2012, 100,000,000+ Americans owned smartphones and tablet use is going through the roof. eMarketer predicts about 70 million Americans will own a tablet by the end of 2012. By 2015, more than half of American Internet users will use tablets to go online.
If you are a business owner or marketing manager, you need to start thinking about how mobile applications fit into your marketing mix. Are you going to advertising on them, have them built for your brand, or both?
You will not be wasting your advertising budget. Mobile apps will soon be everywhere and they will be propelling the future of the Internet.
Localytics reported today that app retention rates are improving as mobile app developers and publishers have shifted their focus from downloads to customer acquisition and retention models. They stated that overall, the app industry has improved retention rates 19% over the last year.
Localytics states that “App publishers for the iPhone and iPad saw the greatest success, with retention rates 52% higher than those on Android.” Maybe most interesting is that the percentage of installed apps that were used more than ten times climbed by a solid 5% (from 26% to 31%).
iPhone has a clear advantage when it comes to retention. “iPhone’s far greater app retention rates is also an echo of the 94 percent retention rate of iPhone itself compared to 47 percent for Android,” the Localytics report states.
Clearly, a focus on creating quality mobile applications that are designed with good usability principles and are useful to users is paying dividends to mobile application developers and publishers.
Based on the most recent numbers from Nielson, half of US mobile service subscribers own a smartphone and each of those, on average, has 41 mobile apps on their device. This is a 28% increase over the previous year according to Nielson, so its pretty easy to see that there is some fantastic growth with regards to mobile application sales. Especially when you take into account the incredible growth in terms of the number of smartphones sold.
Another factor of this survey that stands out is by how much users prefer native mobile applications to html5 applications. Users will spend a great amount more time on a native app than they will on an html5 application. Clearly in most situations, building a native application is still the best choice for now. Nielson’s report also highlighted the incredible growth of this industry in terms of handsets. Right now there are a total of 84 million Android and iOS users in the US and that is more than double the number from just a year ago.
Studies like these tend to punctuate the need for businesses to address how they can leverage mobile apps or they will soon find themselves on the outside looking in. Well conceived and built mobile applications are regularly used by savvy consumers and provide a great way to access an audience that is often turned off by traditional media.