Evaluation
“This can be a huge WTF.”
In a LinkedIn put up this week, Chuck Lapointe, CEO of Toronto-based Narcity Media Group, pointed to what he noticed as a serious disconnect between programmatic shopping for methods and actuality.
Sharing his firm’s advert trade impressions alongside their common income per 1,000 advert impressions (outlined as eCPM) for each iPhone and Android customers, the info confirmed that the common Android eCPM was greater than double that of iPhones.
That is regardless of, as Lapointe identified, the truth that iOS has a increased market share within the UK, US and Canada, and customarily its customers spend extra than Android ones.
He requested: “In what trade, aside of the programmatic media complicated, can we worth customers that spend and interact much less over 150% increased than customers with increased spend and engagement?”
‘Overwhelming majority of bots are Android and Chrome’
Different trade figures confirmed that they noticed the same phenomenon of under-investment in iOS and Apple’s browser, Safari.
Amongst them was advert fraud specialist Dr Augustine Fou, who penned a Substack put up three years in the past on how iOS just isn’t solely cheaper but in addition accounts for many actual clicks on programmatic advertisements.
“Entrepreneurs […] are bidding much less on visitors with out IDs as a result of they suppose that there’s much less focusing on and lowered skill to trace outcomes,” Fou wrote in his put up, referring to Apple’s relative lack of person monitoring below its then-new app monitoring transparency (ATT) coverage.
“As a result of they keep away from bidding on iOS or bid decrease for iOS units, the CPMs for iOS units are far lower than the CPMs for Android and desktop internet (whereas third-party cookies stay in impact).”
Podcast: Will the cookieless future result in simpler digital media? With Havas Media’s Laura Kell
Apple’s ATT coverage has made advert shopping for much less handy and efficiency much less measurable on iOS units. Alternatively, Google dominates the digital promoting market by means of its Google Adverts platform and its continued use of third-party cookies has attracted ongoing funding. So it follows that fewer advertisers have purchased on iOS and Safari.
Nonetheless, nearly all of legitimate engagement with advertisements, based on Fou, comes from iOS units.
“Adverts proven to iOS customers account for almost all of human clicks, regardless of the dearth of cookies and identifiers,” Fou instructed The Media Chief. “Remember that bots like to faux to be Android and Chrome, as a result of they’ll earn increased CPMs than in the event that they pretended to be iOS. So, by far, the overwhelming majority of bots are Android and Chrome.”
Google didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Sluggish deprecation
Jonathan Harrison, head of digital technique at the7stars, instructed The Media Chief that the discrepancy is one thing the company is conscious of within the UK market.
“It comes all the way down to measurement and, typically, a lack of expertise actually the place your automated tech is optimising in direction of,” he defined.
“It’s additionally one thing that’s going to be much more obvious this yr as ‘cookieless’ rolls out extra totally and advertisers begin to see dips of their efficiency.”
Whereas Safari has blocked third-party cookies since 2020, Google has repeatedly delayed cookie deprecation on Chrome. In January, the corporate lastly started deprecating cookies for 1% of customers, with continued deprecation anticipated all through 2024.
So it could be that, by means of Google’s deprecation of cookies, a few of Android’s relative benefit over iOS may due to this fact decline. However, in an trade with The Media Chief, Lapointe expressed doubt over any such erosion of Google’s positioning.
He stated: “I don’t suppose [cookie deprecation] could have a lot impression, as a result of I believe Google will determine a method to make the spend work inside their ecosystem.”
