Mobile Users Less Likely to Click on Ads?

Mobile users are approximately half as likely to click on an advertisement as non-mobile users, a new study by Chitika, a Massachusetts-based online advertising network, suggests. The contrarian findings are based on a sample of 92 million impressions.

The Chitika study shows that 1.3 million impressions(1.5 percent) came from mobile browsing.

Non-mobile clickthrough rates held steady at 0.83 percent, while mobile clickthroughs averaged 0.48 percent.

While the recent growth in smart phones has sparked greater interest in mobile advertising, it appears given the numbers that mobile users are not receptive to advertising, a phenomenon that Chitika says is not surprising, given the mobile users’ propensity to be searching for quick answers or directions.

Of the five major smartphone operating systems--Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, Microsoft’s Windows CE, Palm OS, and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry--iPhone ranked the worst for clickthrough rate at a 0.30 percent.

But the iPhone also accounted for the bulk of mobile hits, at 66 percent. The highest clickthrough rates were observed for phones using "other" operating systems, including group BlackBerry users and a small handful of other phone operating systems including Symbian, Nokia, and HTC.

The clickthrough rates are certainly lower than expected, given the industry’s general consensus that mobile users are more likely to click ads, Chitika says.

So how does one account for the findings, which are contrary to what most would expect? Perhaps rendering is the issue. Chitika notes that the study compares the same ads delivered both to PCs and mobiles.

That likely means inability to render PC-formatted ads on smaller mobile screens reduces clicks, as the ads are unreadable, unviewable or unwieldy.

Still, Chitika suggests that mobile Internet users are disinterested in advertising, and iPhone users are the least interested.

So far, there have been few other studies on mobile clickthrough rates, compared to PC user rates. Given the obvious importance mobile advertising and marketing holds for funding new applications, the matter needs further study.

The study does confirm a couple of observations, however. Many studies have shown that iPhone user behavior is noticeably, sometimes even dramatically different from that of users of other smart phones. The Chitika study confirms that difference in behavior.