top tips on increasing the click thru rates of your mobile ads

I'm just wading through my emails and backlog of things to do and spotted this from the guys at award-winning Admob, the largest wap advertising network globally and is growing at a pretty fast and furious rate. I thought it was advice well worth sharing. I've added my comments in italics.

5 Tips to increase the Click thru Rates of your mobile adverts

1. Change ad text frequently. Keep your campaign fresh and get the highest ROI (return on investment) by frequently changing ad text. Customers are more likely to click on ads that they haven't seen before. [People get bored, so it's not *that* difficult to expect to have to come up with new stuff is it?]

2. Use relevant links. Be sure that the click through URL takes your audience to a relevant landing page and that the product you are promoting is easy to find. [The right landing pages are crucial on web or wap. But get it wrong on wap and it's even worse as you don't have the space to play around with navigation on a phone for someone to bother finding the right page.]

3. Customize your advert. Include the user's phone model into the text of your ad, making it more relevant and dynamic. You can do so by inserting the %phn% tag into the text of your ad. For example, "Share pictures on your %phn%" would become "Share pictures on your RAZR" to a user viewing that ad from a RAZR. [This is particularly important for mobile content providers, and probably not so relevant to non-mobile brands]

4. Be timely. Reference hot products, sales, events and holidays. Be sure to update your text once time sensitive events are over. [Don't do a T-Mobile and send out a message promoting England football mobile content a) to a non-football fan and b) the day after England lost their Euro 2004 match!]

5. Experiment often. Try new ad text and targeting. Experiment with the Run of Network offering to attract more global traffic. Continually trying new things will help you to determine what works best for your business, as well as to ensure your ads are fresh. [I would add to this that you need to monitor closely to work out what is effective and what isn't. Define what success looks like and work backwards from that and measure. What you measure will vary from brand to brand and campaign to campaign, but unless you measure, you'll not be able to compare like with like.]