Your guide to mobile ad formats: Pick the right ones for your next campaign

Mobile web ads come in many forms. From videos to mobile banner ads to interstitial ads, finding the right mobile web ad format for your audience is crucial to maximizing your user acquisition campaigns, and to effectively monetizing your apps.

Matching ad formats to the right audience creates a win-win scenario: budgets are well spent on content that users find relevant and engaging. A massive 78% of consumers will happily accept mobile advertising relevant to their interests. To ensure you’re providing the best possible mobile ads to the most receptive audience, we will explore the most popular formats available and best practices to match your audience with campaign goals.

In the digital realm, there are typically four types of ads:

• Banner ads
• Video ads
• Rich media ads
• Native ads

When developing your marketing strategy for mobile, identifying the suitable ad formats for your particular needs will deliver the best results. Publishers and advertisers alike can benefit from learning each type of ad format and its unique benefits.

Also known as multimedia banners, rich media ads contain several interactive contents such as video, audio, text, or animation to encourage user interaction. As a result, rich media ads offer users a more engaging experience while boosting brand awareness.

For example, the A&E cable network used rich media to promote the third season of Bates Motel to great effect. The network used over 100 cameras to make their ad appear as though the show's characters were jumping out of the banner in the middle of the user’s screen. As a result, A&E recorded a 49% jump in new viewers for the show.

Many apps are capable of displaying several or all of these ad formats — and some apps can combine, remix, or even create their own ad formats. That’s especially true of social media apps. Let’s explore some of the other ad formats and terms that are worth knowing:

• Carousel ads allow advertisers to showcase up to 10 images or videos within one ad, each with its own link. Users can swipe through the different images on their mobiles. Carousel ads are a popular ad format on Instagram and Facebook. Carousels are also an available LinkedIn ad format, along with several other ad types.
• Google Discovery ads appear in Google’s feeds on the Gmail app, the Google app, and the YouTube app. These ads utilize machine learning and are displayed when users are most likely to engage with a brand.  Advertisers provide the building blocks — headlines, images, bids, budgets, etc. — and Google reshapes these components to display the ads across a wide breadth of inventory and formats. These ads are ideal for app marketers to scale conversions, reach new customers or retarget previous clients.
• Bumper ads are a familiar YouTube ad format, where short video ads — six seconds at most — are shown to viewers. This format is especially popular on mobile because it is minimally disruptive to the viewing experience.

1. Adapt creative to specific platforms

Whether you’re creating a video for Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat, your approach should match how users interact with that platform.

Each social network has different user behavior and video etiquette, so research each platform and adapt your creative accordingly. For example, more than 65% of Snapchat users view video with audio, while only 15% of users have audio on while using Facebook and Instagram. So, while audio shouldn’t be neglected, it’s crucial that your ad still works effectively without sound.

2. Understand where your users are coming from

Learning where users come from is one of the most important components of a marketer’s user acquisition strategy. Without this, you’re running campaigns without insight into what works and what doesn’t, preventing your overall strategy from improving. For best results, you want each campaign to lead you to progress with better-informed decisions. This means that even if a particular campaign isn’t successful, you’ll still have insight needed to optimize for better performance. This is why mobile advertisers need to work with a mobile marketing platform.

MMPs provide the insights needed to map out a user’s entire journey, from how they arrived at your app to which in-app events they completed. Moreover, your analytics can reveal behavioral patterns that can be used to optimize your overall strategy.

3. A/B test your ads before scaling up

For best results, it’s important to test the creative elements used for your ads. This is true across all ad formats, as A/B testing gives you valuable insight into which variant will convert the most users.

Depending on the ad format you’re implementing, the focus of your tests will differ. For example, you may be testing different designs and creative for your interstitial ads or entirely different levels for your playable ad. Testing this with sample groups will give you the insight you need to scale up your campaigns with confidence.

4. Make use of social media integration

Nearly three-quarters (74%) of online adults use social networking sites, meaning that social media should play a part in your mobile advertising strategy. Connecting your campaigns to the social presence you already have will help with brand awareness. For example, if your rich media ads have a shareable element, it’s wise to include an option where users can share this on social media. Pairing your ad with social media is also a cost-effective way of boosting your ad’s reach.

5. Ensure you have adequate fraud prevention

Mobile ad fraud affects all apps, with losses in 2021 reaching a shocking $65 billion worldwide. Protecting your ad spend from fraudsters is a critical step to ensuring you acquire real users and that your data is kept clean.

To learn more about mobile ad fraud, read our guide to mobile fraud.

6. Focus on high-value users, not just CTRs

Click-through rates (CTRs) are a great way to learn if your ads are engaging your target audience, but they don’t tell the whole story. By tracking in-app events and learning which channels bring you valuable users further down the line, you can bring in more high-value users by replicating your most successful campaigns.

For example, let’s say you want to compare two campaigns for your mobile game. Campaign A brought you 1,000 new users while Campaign B brought you 500. However, only 10 users from Campaign A made an in-app purchase, while 20 users from Campaign B completed a purchase event. In this scenario, the campaign with the lower CTR is better for ROAS, so it makes sense to scale up here to increase ROI.

7. Don’t forget to retarget

Android users have 2.47 million apps available to them on Google Play, while Apple's App Store has 1.8 million available for iOS. Competition is fierce across all verticals, so it’s critical to retarget valuable users who have installed your app and lapsed. Retargeting is a powerful way to optimize ROAS and LTV because these users have your app installed and have shown signals of intent.

Retargeting efforts include ads on mobile web and in-app, push notifications, and SMS. You can also track events and implement dynamic product ads (DPAs) to bring users back to your app: for more insights, take a look at our e-book on how to optimize your DPAs.

Choosing the right ad format requires you to make some tough decisions about the audience you want to engage, the channels you wish to use, and the networks you’d like to try. Make sure you enlist the help of a mobile measurement partner like Adjust to get key insights into what each ad type has to offer and the uplift it can deliver. This way, you can optimize campaigns to reach and engage the best users for your app.