Mobile advertising saw strong growth across Southeast Asia in 2017, while at the same time, on-target mobile ad performance improved throughout the year.
The Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings Benchmarks report, which accessed more than 3,000 digital campaigns since its launch in Southeast Asia in 2015, found that in the first half of 2017, more than nine in 10 (93%) digital ad campaigns leveraged mobile, and mobile achieved an on-target reach equal to or higher than digital or desktop benchmarks for all but two reported age benchmarks.
Across Southeast Asian markets (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand), digital ads targeting 18-49 year olds age bracket reached their intended audience 85% of the time for mobile, digital, and desktop campaigns. This compares to 2016 benchmarks where just 70% of ads delivered via desktop and 66% delivered via mobile reached their intended audience.
For digital advertising campaigns intended for consumers aged 21-34, those which were served via mobile devices surpassed desktop performance by 32 percentage points (mobile at 78% vs. desktop at 46%).
Looking at categories, advertisers in the Computers & Electronics and Business & Consumer Services sectors had the easiest time reaching their desired audience across digital devices, achieving an on-target success of 75% and 73% respectively, compared to 56% and 55% respectively for advertisers in the Automotive and Entertainment sectors.
For more insights on how mobile ads show more success in reaching online consumers, download the Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings Benchmarks and Findings report.
The Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings Benchmarks and Findings report serves as a guidance for individual campaign effectiveness compared to marketplace averages across total digital, desktrop-only and mobile-only for age and gender demographics, age spans, advertiser categories and site-type (publishers, platform/ad networks).
This report includes data from more than 3,000 Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings campaigns from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand measured through 30 June 2017, where the minimum number of site observations was at least 30. A site observation is defined as the performance of a campaign on one site with a least 5,000 impressions with the specified demographic as the intended audience. With sample sizes exceeding 30, it can be reasonably expected to see stable benchmarks. The average on-target percent is the number of impressions that reached the intended demographic divided by the number of total impressions in the campaign. The on-target percent is calculated by weighting each campaign by the number of impressions it contained within each category or demographic. Weighted data is used to allow site observations with higher impression counts to have a higher contribution to the final benchmarks. This provides a more statistically sound representation of average campaign performance.