• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, November 16, 2016

In its Quarterly Native Report, Bidtellect, a mulltidevice native ad platform, found that click-through rates were 200% higher on mobile than on desktop for the first three quarters of 2016.

Further, in-feed placements generated higher page views and lower bounce rates than in-ad and recommendation widget units.

Among other findings:

Here's how the CTRs broke down each quarter:

Q1: CTRs were 165% higher on mobile than desktop.

Q2: CTRs were 220% higher on mobile than desktop.

Q3: CTRs were 220% higher on mobile than desktop.

A  blog post about the findings said that despite the high click-through rates for mobile, that isn’t necessarily where deeper engagement is happening. Post-click engagement is significantly greater on desktop than mobile. On average in 2016 year-to-date, page views were 130% higher on desktop than mobile, and bounce rates were 37% lower on desktop than mobile.

Bidtellect found that as demand for native advertising has increased, marketers are leaning on the more common and less sophisticated metrics such as CTR to measure campaign success. When using new formats, marketers tend to stick with what they know, but as native continues to grow, Bidtellect said that post-engagement metrics such as engagement and conversion will become more widely adopted.

The research found that different formats generate different levels of engagement. For example, in-feed placements generate higher page views and lower bounce rates than in-ad and recommendation widget units. These are considered native ad units capable of generating high consumer engagement. On average in 2016 year-to-date, in-feed page views were 147% higher than in-ad.

Bidtellect said that marketers trying to reach their audiences on mobile devices need to transition away from CTR as a success metric, and toward post-click engagement metrics. Consumers are clicking on content on their mobile devices, but are less likely to engage further on mobile than desktop. For marketers to get the most out of their cross-device content marketing and native advertising strategies, they need to optimize against these post-engagement metrics.

Key takeaways from the report:

--In-feed placements drive the most consumer engagement compared to in-ad and recommendation widgets. All three formats are extremely valuable, but including in-feed placements in native ad plans is likely to generate the best results with consumers.

--Plan ahead to create and distribute timely content. This will help generate high levels of engagement.

--Post-engagement metrics across devices, and formats, will become increasingly important for marketers as they seek more meaningful ways to determine how consumers are interacting with their content.

“More brands are understanding that when consumers engage with their content, they engage with their brand,” Lon Otremba, CEO Bidtellect, told Native Insider via email. “Shifting success metrics beyond the click to post-click engagement metrics is so important because marketers simply cannot treat native the same as banners if they want to see success.”

The data revealed that while CTRs on mobile are 2x greater than desktop, real engagement value for advertisers is significantly higher on desktop. “Desktop is still a higher quality engagement vehicle than mobile, though we are seeing the gap closing, if slowly, as better mobile executions and publisher designs take hold,” Otremba said.

Marketers need to watch closely how their mobile content is engaged with. “For example, if a particular piece of content has a high CTR but low engagement, then the marketer should veer away from creating that kind of content for mobile, and stick with the content with the highest engagement,” Otremba said.

Bidtellect’s platform processes more than five billion native auctions daily across 6.5 million distinctly targetable placements. Bidtellect collects data from the start of an auction through post-click consumer activity including but not limited to the metrics captured in this report.