According to Smaato, a mobile ad optimization and advertising company, Internet users on Symbian phones, feature phones and Windows Mobile phones are far more likely to click on mobile ads than users on iPhones, Android phones, Palm devices and Blackberries. To get this data, Smaato, analyzed over 4 billion ad requests on 36 mobile ad networks. Worldwide, the click-through rate (CTR) for Android users declined markedly over the last two month. While Android still had an above-average CTR in January (just behind Symbian), Android ranked at the bottom of Smaato’s ranking for March.
Android in South East Asia
While the worldwide CTR for Android is down, however, the CTR for Android phones in South East Asia is far higher than for any other platform. Sadly, Smaato only publishes a comparative index doesn’t release the actual click-through rates for all the ad networks it supports. Because of this, it isn’t clear if this just means that the CTR for all the other platforms in South East Asia simply dropped, or if the usage patterns for Android phones in countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines are very different from the worldwide average.
Who Clicks on Mobile Ads? Symbian and Feature Phone Users
Surprisingly, users with Web-enabled feature phones are far more likely to click on ads than those on most smartphone platforms, even though the user experience is likely to be far inferior to clicking on an ad on a smartphone.
According to Smaato’s analysis, Symbian users are more likely to click on ads while surfing the Web on their devices than users on any other platform. While we can only speculate as to why this is the case, chances are that this has more to do with the different user demographics than the actual user experience on these devices.
For more details from Smaato’s report, including fill rates for different ad networks and data from previous reports, head over the company’s website.
