Mobile advertising network xAd has released an interesting report on the most recent trends in mobile-local advertising, specifically in the context of the restaurant industry. The reported data is derived from the performance seen on their network, which delivered 3.4 billion locally-targeted ads in the second quarter of 2012.
According to the report, the overall ads click-through rates (CTR) are 8% for search and 0.68% for display, and are significantly higher than these for the restaurant category alone (4.86% and 0.42% accordingly). On the contrary, the restaurant category performs much above average in terms of secondary action rate (SAR). The most common secondary actions in this category are downloading map or looking up directions to the place (63%), and calling the business (17%) which is a very strong signal for purchase intent. This is supported by another recent research by xAd and Telemetrics, which found that 85% of smartphone/tablet users, who conducted research for a restaurant ultimately made a purchase.
xAd provides a break down per restaurant category for the secondary actions data with pizza, sit-down restaurants, coffee, and fast food facilities being at the spotlight. The most popular secondary action for all but coffee is checking map and driving directions with it spiking to as high as 82% in the fast food category. Calls are most common secondary actions with pizza restaurants (19%), because of the delivery service popularity. The picture is entirely different with coffee shops. According to the report, only 30% look up driving directions and map as a secondary action (which is low compared to this metric for the other types of restaurant facilities), and at the same time 27% check reviews, and 38% look for other information, such as working hours.
Another important finding is that mobile search activity related to dining is much higher in the later hours of the day than it is for most of the other local search categories. The peak of this activity is around 8PM, but it stays relatively high until 10-11PM. The report suggests that “these hours are prime territory for mobile-local ads targeted to the late night dinner crowd, club-goers and late night snackers.” Thus, the stress is put on the importance of time of day and user segment ad targeting.