Mobile Marketing and Surgical Metrics: How Indonesia Hopes to Succeed

In the markets measured by Comscore globally, two observations stand out when reviewing the impact of mobile platforms since their inception. The first is, perhaps to be expected, that the emergence and subsequent growth in consumption via smartphones and tablets have revolutionised the digital landscape in every region. The second insight is that whilst broad generalisations and global trends can provide important macro-level understanding, the geographic and demographic nuances already present in a desktop-only world have increased exponentially with the growing ubiquity of handheld devices. Mobile has brought new audiences, new content types, and created overwhelming volumes of new digital time around the world, but it has done so in an uneven manner that presents both challenges and opportunities for players in this space.

This additional fragmentation clearly presents a need for sophisticated and granular measurement of mobile behaviour, but since the majority of global internet users access via more than one device in a month, these solutions cannot exist in isolation from the wider digital mix. It is important for brands, agencies and publishers to know which opportunities exist to reach particular users, and only unduplicated views between platforms can truly help connect audiences, content and advertising.

With the Industry, for the Industry

The digital advertising industry in Indonesia has taken a united approach in solving this new world of measurement needs, independently reviewing a range of providers before selecting Comscore as the Online Audience Measurement Partner in Indonesia for two years from 2016 to 2018.

The appointment, supported by the Indonesian Creative Economy Agency (Bekraf), means that ongoing development of digital measurement forms one part of a collaborative effort to grow the digital industry. Research and development can follow a path that fits the evolving needs of the Indonesian Digital Measurement Consortium (IDMC), comprising five associations that represent the majority stake in Indonesia’s advertising ecosystem: the Association of Asia Pacific Advertising Media (AAPAM), the Indonesian Advertisers Association (APPINA), the Indonesian Digital Association (IDA), the Indonesian E-Commerce Association (idEA) and the Indonesian Advertising Companies Association (P3I).

As we see in other markets with measurement agreed by joint industry representation, the presence of a trusted online currency has benefits for both buy and sell sides of the advertising marketplace. It helps advertisers and their agencies to identify digital content that best reaches their target audiences, using a set of free-standing and directly comparable metrics, and it allows publishers to independently demonstrate the true value of their digital properties. A reliable, scalable methodology allows the integration of new platforms, and more scope to align and compare audiences and advertising with other media.

Uncovering Mobile Audiences

Measuring today’s digital markets relies heavily on the ability to incorporate mobile within the scope of research. Over the past couple of years, Comscore has developed a census tag-based solution to rapidly build momentum for mobile measurement in a greater number of international markets, and to create the commercial frameworks to eventually create user research panels on these devices. For Indonesia, this first step has unlocked usage behaviour for the 51.7 million consumers (an incredible 81% of the total digital population) who access the internet via mobile devices, and has given advertisers and agencies greater scope to their digital planning.

Already we have uncovered valuable insights into audience scale on mobile devices, demonstrating that the largest mobile properties now offer audiences beyond leading websites on desktop.

It is not simply a case of volume. Understanding the behaviour of mobile users is critical for publishers to refine their content experience, and for advertisers to make the best use of the right platforms to convey their messages across the entire digital mix. This includes understanding variations in audience volume and engagement by demography, such as the age / gender breaks shown in the chart (male audiences are larger, but female users consume more mobile minutes per person), but also habits of site and category audiences. This extends to distinguishing between smartphones and tablets, and between browsing versus app consumption.

(Source: Comscore Mobile Metrix, Indonesia, October 2016)

Even within the umbrella of ‘mobile’, platform selection for consumers can be deeply nuanced. Looking at a category-level view, it is clear that smartphones often account for more time-sensitive or location-based needs, whilst more open-ended tasks are deferred to or proactively enjoyed on tablet devices. This type of consideration can become even more revealing when looking at individual entities, understanding where and how mobile and multi-platform consumers are consuming content and can be reached with advertising.

(Source: Comscore Mobile Metrix, Indonesia, October 2016)

Perhaps most revealing of all is how mobile audiences interact with desktop audiences. At a national level, Indonesia has a much smaller multi-platform segment of users, with 14% of consumers active on both desktop and mobile within a month, but this picture looks different within categories and for individual entities. Understanding what makes news readers on mobile different from users of the social media category yields powerful learnings for content, user experience and marketing.

Looking to the Future

A complexity particularly pertinent to the mobile world is that the landscape itself has rapidly evolved even during the development window of measurement solutions. Faster connections have led to an increase in more data-heavy usage such as rich advertising formats and video consumption, and mobile devices have opened the door to new forms of content consumption. The iPhone App store launched in June 2008, and 8 years later in June 2016, mobile apps crossed the 50% threshold for share of all digital time in the UK (and 49% in the US).

Measuring apps adds complexity to an already difficult task, from the metrics (what constitutes a page view in an app?) through to the execution using non-cookie-based tools that reduce the reliance on mobile publishers to incorporate third party tags into their app development. The most reliable methodology requires development of panels, but recruitment challenge here is greater even than on desktop, but the payoff in terms of breadth and depth adds another layer of value. We are eagerly anticipating the formal upgrade of our mobile measurement capabilities, incorporating the panels which have been recruiting and producing preliminary data in recent months.

Mobile continues to deliver advertising growth ahead of the broader digital market – recently IAB Singapore and eMarketer predicted mobile share of digital ad revenue in Asia would dramatically expand between 2016 and 2020 in all Asian markets, including Indonesia (mobile share of digital to rise from 26.7% to 60.5%), Singapore (35.8% to 80.9%) and Hong Kong (36.0% to 79.8%). These increases will depend heavily on advertisers receiving solutions and tools to combat increasingly sophisticated threats around viewability, invalid traffic and fraud. Once metrics and standards are available, marketers and their agencies can assess mobile campaigns to the same degree of effectiveness as other digital investments and have renewed confidence in all of them. They will need to understand cross-device usage and reach at a truly comparable, campaign level. This will help increase digital share overall, and allow mobile expectations to be based on specific goals for those platforms.

Mobile advertising, along with its desktop equivalent, must continue to develop solutions and tools in order to combat the increasingly sophisticated issues surrounding viewability, invalid traffic and fraud. Once metrics and standards are available, marketers and their agencies can assess mobile campaigns to the same degree of effectiveness as other digital investments. Marketers considering mobile as part of the overall digital strategy need to understand cross-device usage and reach at a campaign level. This will help increase digital share overall, and allow mobile share to be based on specific goals for those platforms.

Plotting a Course for Success

With digital collectively and mobile especially growing audiences and share of media time, the need for accountable and trusted measurement is required to enable brands to operate across platforms with confidence. We read frequently about the fragmentation of media, and that suggests an even greater need to streamline the path between consumers, content and advertising – an independent currency that addresses all platforms and is developed in consultation with the industry itself seems a logical starting point for that unity, with some important considerations:

1. Know what is being measured: For either media planning or advertising currencies, it is crucial to know what is being measured, either when implementing insights from one provider, or comparing between several. From an audience perspective, there is a clear difference between one user visiting a site on their laptop, smartphone and tablet versus three different users. From an advertising point of view, viewability measures will vary wildly if one provider automatically removes invalid traffic (including fraud) while another does not.
2. Ensure all parties are aligned on expectations: At a customer / client level and for the industry as a whole, it is important to establish standards and expectations that are based on the concepts in the previous point. Reach and frequency metrics are more effective if based on actual humans, rather than devices, while viewability should be anchored on stringent accuracy, rather than inadvertently incentivising the use of less thorough measurement to achieve artificially high numbers.
3. Optimise based on true value: The real value of surgical metrics is the ability to make informed marketing decisions. Knowing where valuable audiences can be found, factoring in the overlap between platforms, and understanding where advertising is delivered efficiently allows marketers to accurately plan or evaluate each impression and refine campaigns for the most impact at the best ROI.

The digital and especially mobile world shows no sign of easing its growth and development, but in Indonesia, we are heading on the same path.