Advertisement on Mobile Apps – Creative Tips to Follow

Advertising is conventionally regarded as an interruption that hinders the actual experience that people are trying to have- be it reading newspaper, watching TV or browsing a website. Albeit advertisements are interrupting, we are now seeing the new era of ‘appvertising’ that is equally entertaining and engaging. The new wave of advertising on mobile apps has opened gates of new opportunities for publishers. These ‘appvertisements’ are engaging and have the potential to become an experience in its own right.

Welcome to Appvertising!

Advertisers are taking advantage of flexibility and richness of interfaces offered by prevailing smart mobile devices. They are utilizing the mobile app platform for developing ads that have much more in common with apps than conventional commercial or banner ads. And this technique of advertising on mobile app platform can be termed as ‘appvertising’. Even in the early stage of appvertisment, some tips and rules of thumb have already started to surface. Here are few tips to consider while designing the strategy for the medium.

Give user the control

While appvertising, you have to forget about the captive audience for whom you can stream out a video at your defined pace. Here you are dealing with people that in case find nothing interesting will skip your appvertisements. So keep them entertained and use ‘skip’ button in your ad, in case user get bore and your ad strategy fails.

To avoid any failing circumstance, it is advisable to create an engaging story that let user explore more information. Use the text cautiously. Give more controls to users and focus more on creating video and audio to set the stage.

Grab attention, don’t go over the top!

It is essential that your ad must be built with simple and clear layout. It is true that interactive ads appear to be more visually busy than print ads, but this does not diminish their impact. The ad must have look and feel just as native as the apps on that particular device. Go creative with your ads, and strike a balance between grabbing attention not going over the top!

You take advantage of many unique features of mobile devices. Like, you can use GPS to determine the user’s location instead of asking them to type. You can even develop ads that utilize accelerometer, gyroscope or the camera.

Balance the complexity and technical limitation

It is obvious that adding complexity to your ads will put some strain on technology that the user may be using.  While designing heavy graphic, keep in mind the technical limitation of networks that your users will be operating on. If world’s most elegant graphic for your ad takes more than 45 seconds to load, it will fail to get any impression. No one will see your ad or waits to see it completely loaded. A good thumb rule is to consider 100kB per second over cellular networks download rate.

However, there is a trick for balancing the complexity and technical limitation. You can use two-dimensional sprites and jpeg mask, if you are working on ad with HTML framework. This will reduce the loading time of your ads.

Offer something in return

One of the old methods to attract user is to offer something in return. To ensure that users get attract to your ad, offer something of valuable like, discount coupons, free music or app. You can even use images for discount coupons that will automatically get saved for later use.

In some case offering information may be just as compelling. You can think like, providing users with ways to find deals on products, how-to videos, recipes or store location. Whatever way you choose, do not forget to make call-to-action button large and hit areas larger to reduce the false taps on the ad.  If you are planning to use more than one call-to-action button, utilize the whole screen.

Optimize your campaign

Mobile has some powerful insights that allow you to know how users behaved with your ad. Like insights will let you capture zoom, pinches, swipes, gestures and taps, thereby enabling you to know exactly how user engaged with your ads. You can even track when and how user exits. If the number of exit increases, make the changes in your ad accordingly. Another thing to monitor is how prompt user is in clicking the call-to-action button.

Hence, keeping these tips and thumb rules in mind you can get success with appvertising your ads on mobile app. Remember, you never know when your app will interrupt the user playing his/her favorite game. So, it will be better for your ad to be more engaging and entertaining to the user! Think accordingly and follow these tips.