Finance Vertical Sees Biggest Mobile Revenue Growth

According to Millennial Media’s Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach and Targeting (S.M.A.R.T.) Report for November, the Finance vertical saw 802 percent year-over-year revenue growth in the third quarter of 2010, leading all verticals.

Retail & Restaurants followed with 745 percent growth, while Telecommunications saw 719 percent growth, Travel experienced 411 percent growth, Armed Forces saw 372 percent growth and Entertainment saw 315 percent growth.

Millennial Media decided to take a closer look at the financial services vertical. It found that brands in this vertical are aiming to reach the “growing number of mobile banking customers and consumers leveraging mobile to manage other financial aspects of their lives.”

The company also notes that consumers are taking a more proactive approach to their finances due to the recession, which means that the “days of passively waiting for account summaries and bills are over.”

In the financial services ad vertical, banking accounts for 38 percent of the pie, followed by car insurance with 20 percent, life insurance with 15 percent, home loans with 12 percent and other sub-verticals with 15 percent.

Advertisers in this vertical “are consistently including mobile as part of their product and services launch campaigns to achieve high unique reach in a short campaign

period. Campaign targeting methods such as Takeover, GEO, and Audience are being used on these types of campaigns to drive deep consumer engagement. In addition, year-long registration-focused mobile campaigns are being used to drive high niche SOV and efficient customer acquisition and ROI.”

Thirty-one percent of financial services campaigns used place call as a targeting method, followed by 28 percent that used submit form and 19 percent who used site search.

Quoting Nielsen data, Millennial notes that there were 88.9 million mobile Web users in the U.S. as of October, and that Millennial reaches 76.2 million, or more than 8 out of 10, of this group.

Taking a step back and looking at the overall picture, Millennial found that custom landing pages took the lead as the top destination for brands on mobile with 39 percent of the campaign destination mix in November. This was driven by retail brands pumping out custom landing pages for holiday promotions.

Traffic to site followed with 34 percent, and application downloads claimed 27 percent of the pie.

Source:

http://www.millennialmedia.com/wp-content/images/SMART/MillennialMedia-SMART-November-2010.pdf