iPhone the top smartphone device in terms of mobile ad ROI: Opera

These findings are from the State of Mobile Advertising report, which is based on insights from the second quarter of 2012 and summarises the mobile ad platform’s results from serving more than 9,000 global customers with more than 35 billion ad impressions per month and driving more than $240 million (US) of revenue to mobile publishers in 2011.

Based on these results, Opera inferred that devices with better usability and features that allow more interaction between the advertisement and the device’s functionality have better monetisation potential than less user-friendly devices.

“We also see the importance of device market share in encouraging advertisers to target particular devices. Windows phones have most if not all of the advanced features of Android and iPhones, but low levels of user adoption stifle its performance,” said the report.

Opera also found that the iPad delivered an average 3CPM of US$3.96 across the mobile opera ad platform. This further illustrates the point as the iPad epitomises user-friendly devices and is achieving significant user adoption in user groups that are highly desirable to advertisers. For example, 40 per cent of physicians own or plan to own an iPad or tablet by the end of 2012, according to Nielsen projections.

The study recommends that advertisers make tablet ad executions an important part of their strategy in the next six months.

Rich media is also a key differentiator in driving engagement, said the study. So far in the first half of 2012, Apple’s iOS has delivered a clear majority of rich media ad impressions—correlating to higher eCPM. In addition, according to Opera’s rich media index, 66 per cent of users that click to a video will complete that interaction with an average dwell time of 52 seconds. Photo-taking capabilities warrant an even higher dwell time (1 min 25 secs), and about half of consumers will continue to interact with the ad post-click.

Advertisers have taken note of this. This year, Opera has observed the number of standard and expandable banner executions diminish while HTML5 rich media and video ad executions are increasing.

The US and Canada generate the majority of ad requests, with 73 per cent of the global total. US eCPM is also the highest (US$1.98), closely followed by the UK, Italy, Spain, Germany and France ($1.94).

Overall Asia-Pacific countries make up nine of the top 20 countries ranked by impressions. The region is led by Indonesia in fourth place (after the UK), followed by Japan, India, China and Australia in fifth, eighth ninth and 10th place, respectively.