Multichannel Effects of Mobile In-Feed Advertising

With in-feed advertising becoming an increasingly popular advertising tool for advertisers to reach mobile consumers, the authors propose an integrated model of contemporaneous, carryover, and spillover effects to measure the incremental contributions of in-feed ads in multiple types of mobile apps: newsfeed, social, and video. They empirically examine the three proposed effects of newsfeed ads, social feed ads, and video feed ads using data from a large-scale ad campaign for a new mobile game. The data set contains 10,115,801 impressions, 286,506 clicks, and 12,706 conversions. First, the findings show that social feed ads have the strongest contemporaneous effects on both ad clicks and conversions; social feed ads are 1.87 times more likely to generate a click and 1.69 times more likely to generate a conversion than newsfeed ads, followed by video feed ads (clicks: 1.73 times; conversions: 1.55 times). Second, video feed ads have the strongest carryover effect, followed by social feed ads, while newsfeed ads have a negative carryover effect. Third, newsfeed ads exhibit the strongest spillover effect; prior newsfeed ad exposures are more effective than prior social or video feed ad exposures at promoting clicks and conversions upon subsequent exposure in other channels.