iOS still killing it with mobile ads, US owns mobile transactions

When it comes to mobile ads, iOS is still raking in the biggest revenues, with the iPhone’s takings alone beating those of Android as a whole.

According to the latest State of Mobile Advertising report from Norwegian software giant Opera, the iPhone generates 36.4% of revenue compared to Android’s 27.8%, and overall iOS is the clear leader, with 43.8% of impressions served on Apple devices.

Apple’s dominance is even more evident in the tablet sector, where it accounts for 90% of traffic.

Within Android itself,Samsung is understandably dominant, accounting for 58.5% of all impressions. HTC, Motorola and LG meanwhile fall far behind, all in the seven to 11% range.

It’s also becoming increasingly evident that the US is the market is the most willing to buy stuff on its mobile phones. According to Opera, three out of every four dollars of all mobile transactions occur in the United States. Just fewer than 50% of all ad requests are in the American mobile ad market, but it accounts for nearly 75% of revenue.

That said, it saw a slight drop in its global marketshare of ad impressions. In Q1 2013, the U.S. share of requests was 50.67%, while this quarter it represents 49.3% of the market.

And if you’re wondering what kind of ad you should be focusing your mobile strategy on, it looks like banner ads are definitely on the way out, at least if you’re trying to target people in the US. Opera took a closer look at 378 mobile ad campaigns running in that country during the month of May, each with over one million impressions. It found that, on average, rich media campaigns performed far better than standard banner ads, sometimes as much as 400%:

Breaking it down a bit further, we saw that rich media ads served within mobile applications were more compelling than those served on the mobile web. Users clicked on in-app ads 1.53% of the time, vs. 1.12% for mobile web ads. Standard banner ads, by comparison, average a 0.39% click-through rate when served in-app and 0.32% when displayed on a mobile website.

As for the kind of ads people are clicking on, it looks like travel is still leading the way.

Opera found that the best performing ads — those which achieve click-through rates well above one percent — are in the Automotive, Entertainment, Mobile Content and Travel categories. Unsurprisingly, all of the top campaigns in these categories were rich media, though just half of them were in-app vs. mobile web.

The insights are derived from the company’s own mobile advertising platform, which it claims serves 60+ billion ad impressions per month via 13 000 mobile sites and apps reaching 400-million people a month. The platform is apparently set to pull in over US$600-million for its advertising partners this year.