Apple Saw Over One-Third Of Mobile Ad Requests In Q1, Adfonic Says, But Samsung Surges In Engagement

Apple continues to rule the roost when it comes to mobile ad share, according to UK-based ad firm Adfonic, but Samsung is winning a small victory in terms of seeing higher engagement for ads displayed on its smartphones, with better click-through-rates (CTR) and higher earned cost-per-mille (eCPM). There’s also a general trend that sees tablets overall increasing their share, suggesting we haven’t seen slates at anywhere near peak market saturation just yet.

The iPhone and iPod touch together account for over a third of all ad requests served by Adfonic, which sees hundreds of billions of impressions on a monthly basis. Both of those devices saw share slip for the quarter vs. the fourth quarter of 2012,by two points and six points respectively, but Samsung remained flat even though it has six devices in the Adfonic top ten now. Combined, Samsung has only around 12 percent of the overall share, but its CTR is strong and getting stronger.

Samsung device CTRs were stronger than Apple’s for the full quarter in both the U.S. and the UK, which is a first for Adfonic’s reports. CTR on Samsung phones was 15 percent stronger in January, and grew to 50 percent stronger in February, and finally 70 percent stronger in March. That means that advertisers still have a far greater reach on iOS in terms of getting their ads in front of users, but on Samsung devices, users seem to be far more willing to click those ads, which means displaying them is that much more likely to result in a successful conversion.

Apple has offered the best CTR for smartphones during all of 2012, according to Adfonics, and for most of that year for tablets, too. Now, the trend seems to indicate that Samsung tablets are getting very close to passing the iPad in terms of CTR, too, since they narrowed the gap between them and the Apple slate by over 50 percent during Q1 2013. Samsung’s tablets occupy even less of the market compared to Apple’s when it comes to impressions, however, with the iPad representing 56.5 percent of all ads served, and Samsung combining for just under 15 percent. Samsung still leads all iPad competitors, however, thanks in part to the variety of its tablet hardware lineup.

Overall, Adfonic sees that the trend of tablet growth that was a theme throughout 2012 continues to persist in 2013; one out of every seven ad request inbound to the network came from a tablet, the company says, which is around 15 percent. Apple’s iPad was the second biggest device by ad share overall, in fact, and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 made its way into the top 10 with 1.1 percent of all requests, too.