In an effort to drive advertising revenue, Twitter announced a new mobile app install suite available for advertising space on and off Twitter as a result of the October acquisition of MoPub, a mobile ad exchange company.
MoPub is responsible for more than 130 billion ad requests each month, reaching over one billion mobile users. Upon the $350 billion acquisition of the firm, Twitter publicly released its intentions to expand its native advertising reach. The strategy behind each organization is dominated by a highly “mobile-first” mentality, making the pair a relevant and like-minded partnership.
The new promoted content style will allow users to install other mobile apps advertised directly from their mobile Twitter feed. The mobile app advertising format has been in private beta testing on Twitter for the previous year and has produced a number of satisfied customers during the study. Since its debut in 2012, mobile app install ads are currently the most popular form of advertisements on the web, and have been an enormous driver of income for social media outlets such as Facebook.
Although Twitter is somewhat behind in the mobile advertising marketplace with limited content promotion capabilities, the release of this new format comes with a wider reach for ads beyond Twitter’s feed. Thanks to the association with MoPub, advertisers will be able to bid on ad space both on and off Twitter for their mobile app install content through Twitter’s singular interface, making it much simpler to budget ad spending and engagement tracking. This integrated marketing capability will allow greater consistency throughout an advertiser’s campaign and, consequently, increase its legitimacy among consumers.
This new type of content available on an expanded platform is the first of 15 developments in the works at Twitter. Its rollout is an effort to attract ad spend from the growing number of companies whose marketing strategies rely heavily upon mobile app installs. Currently, Twitter holds only a 2.4 percent share of the worldwide mobile ad market, while Facebook and Google make up nearly 70 percent. The new integration looks to break into this segment in order to combat the dismal outlook brought on by slowed user growth rates for four consecutive quarters. Twitter has been struggling to find its niche within the advertising realm since becoming a public company, but these new updates may be enough to push it up to par with giants Google and Facebook.
