Several forward-thinking brands, agency execs, and publishers are pushing to build a presence on platforms that, according to recent data science, are considered “inherently unquantifiable” — mobile messaging apps.
Mobile messaging apps like Kik, Line, WeChat and WhatsApp are all platforms that possess hundreds of millions of registered users but offer little insight into how media is shared among them.
“There’s just little way to track the traffic acquisition. The systems aren’t in place for them to quantify it,” said Rebecca Watson, vp of business development at ad network RadiumOne. However, she went on to add, “Just because they can’t exactly say how large the importance is, doesn’t mean it’s not important.”
Because sharing on mobile messaging apps generally consist of users copying and pasting links and then sending them to their contacts, publishers and advertisers alike are unable to track the traffic they deliver. This activity is known as “mobile dark social.” And since sites have no way of telling which specific app a visitor came, publishers and advertisers have a hard time optimizing for these apps. However, the media industry has started experimenting with them nonetheless, hoping that the analytics for these apps will one day catch up with the size of their user bases.
“Users will continue to adopt these systems and have conversations in these platforms, and these apps are not going away,” said Watson. “So we have to get started now with what we have.”
In addition to Watson, everyone from publishers to ad tech companies and media buyers to fast food brands are trying to figure out messaging apps and are excited about their potential.
For example, the publishing company BuzzFeed added, in addition to looking for a full-time employee whose only role will be to determine the publication’s messaging-apps strategy, a WhatsApp sharing button to its iOS site this past October and has seen shares from it steadily increase since, according to BuzzFeed’s spokeswoman Ashley McCollum. However, BuzzFeed still believes some of its sharing might also be occurring in other places like Gchat and Whisper and messaging apps. These efforts are meant to capitalize on BuzzFeed’s growth in “mobile dark social” referral traffic, which has increased fourfold in the past 12 months.
“We’re still figuring it out, and it’s early days for these messaging apps, but especially as we expand internationally, where many of these messaging apps have high penetration, they’re really top of mind for us,” McCollum said.
The consensus among the industry seems to be that it is only a matter of time before an “agreed-upon analytics” for these platforms emerges. Even without these analytics, a few brands have had the courage to enter the messaging-app competition anyway.
Source: Digiday
