There are a number of options when looking into being more “mobile-friendly” with your company’s advertising efforts. Some of these include display/banner advertisements, mobile search, branded applications, SMS/MMS, and coupons— to name a few options. Even with the amount of options that are out there, many companies are still skeptical. The uncertainty in spending more on mobile advertising is something which results from many companies wanting to be immediately impressed by the medium’s effectiveness in reaching their target market. This is a reasonable concern, in their respect, but sometimes the way to get ahead of the competition is to, quite frankly, make that leap of faith.

Time is a crucial factor to keep in mind when rating a medium’s effectiveness. Most companies who choose to “go-mobile” do not allow their efforts enough time to produce the result that they wish to achieve. Many companies have dismissed mobile advertising as a highly-effective medium because of their rather “average” results in the short-run. If you look at advertisers who have been present in mobile for a while and/or have collectively used mobile platforms—such as Google mobile, AdMob, Admoda, etc.—there has been more of a positive response.

In 2011 especially, an increasing number of companies are realizing the importance of advertising in the mobile medium. Not only are the advertisers who have been successful in this medium increasing their spending for mobile platforms, but there seems to be a larger amount of new companies jumping on the mobile bandwagon. If this continues, companies will not only put serious consideration into implementing mobile advertising, but potentially have it as a staple approach in their overall advertising strategy.

Why you may ask… well, do you like to pay for the same thing twice?  Most often when negotiating a CPA buy with the publisher networks, they will require that they get paid on view-through conversions.  A view-through conversion occurs when an Internet user who has seen your ad, but not clicked on it, completes the predetermined action on the advertiser’s website.  Basically the idea is that whether the Internet user was consciously aware or only subliminally influenced by the ad they saw, it affected their behavior and it helped lead to the conversion on your website.  This is a logical argument and I cannot disagree that the publisher network deserves to get paid under this scenario.  Where this gets messy is when your customer has seen and been cookied for two or more ads on different publisher networks and when the customer converts ONCE, the two ad networks come knocking for payment and you have to pay TWICE for one order.

Ad serving technology such as DART for Advertisers can solve the problem of having to pay multiple times for the one conversion.  The technology enables you to attribute the conversion to only one network by telling you who last cookied the converting user.  So if your ad was seen 10 days ago on publishing network A but 2 days ago on publishing network B – only network B will get paid.  It is very important that you have the publishing networks agree to bill off of your ad serving technologies reporting.  The bigger networks only tend to trust a few brands so you’ll have to make sure you’re investing in the right tool.  Beyond being able to tell you which banner publishing network last cookied the user, some technologies will also allow you to tag all other forms of paid Internet marketing as well.  In this scenario, you’ll know whether to attribute the conversion to your email marketing campaign, paid search effort, banner advertising, or affiliate marketing campaign.

I don’t know how many advertisers out there are double and triple paying for conversions but I guarantee you it is much more than a handful.  Beware when entering into multiple CPA deals across multiple networks.  You will get excellent exposure and reach but you might also get burned.  Make sure you are protected and invest in ad serving technology.