Q4 Marketplace Report: premium brand spend comes to mobile programmatic

Thursday, 5 March 2015

At the end of 2014, mobile programmatic advertising saw record levels of spend driven by substantial growth in ad prices and premium brand spend. Brand advertisers delivered 52% of overall advertiser spend in the week leading up to Dec. 25. This increase coincided with higher premiums paid for mobile app inventory overall. Publishers benefited the most from video and rich media ad formats, with eCPMs outperforming their static counterparts. Learn about these highlights and more in our quarterly MoPub Mobile Advertising Marketplace Report.

The Marketplace Report takes an in-depth look at monetization and ad performance across the mobile programmatic ecosystem. It reflects data from our real-time bidding exchange, MoPub Marketplace, one of the world’s largest mobile advertising exchanges. MoPub Marketplace data is representative of over 170 billion monthly ad requests, more than 1 billion unique devices, and 140+ demand-side platforms.

The biggest change in 2014: brands came to mobile in a big way, placing the majority of spend leading up to the holidays.

Q4 Marketplace Report: premium brand spend comes to mobile programmatic

In this quarter’s report, we highlight trends in spend categorization, eCPM and click-through rate.

Ad pricing continues to increase

The Marketplace saw considerable year-over-year percentage gains in overall eCPM, indicating advertisers are finding increasing value in mobile app inventory.

Q4 Marketplace Report: premium brand spend comes to mobile programmatic

Other highlights from the report:

  • Video and rich media: Interactive formats helped publishers command higher eCPMs for both banner and interstitial ad sizes. Publishers who introduced native ads in Q4 also cited an ability to increase ad revenue while maintaining customer satisfaction.
  • Categories: Gaming leads the pack in terms of both eCPM and CTR performances across top mobile app categories. Entertainment and sports round out the top three for eCPM while entertainment and utilities rank second and third for CTR, respectively.

The data reflected here is solely representative of quarterly trends from exchange-traded media; it does not include any ad network or ad network mediation data. MoPub does not sell advertising and does not buy inventory. The data includes month-over-month and year-over-year trends across several dimensions that impact revenue for mobile application publishers.

The information contained herein is based on internal data and data from a third-party that we do not control, so could be subject to errors and omissions.

Have questions or want more details? Email MoPub-datareports@twitter.com and we’ll get back to you soon. Download the full report here.