A new study of mobile advertising shows that there is more to mobile advertising than the iPhone, as it was outperformed by both Symbian and feature phones in terms of click through rates.
The survey comes from mobile advertising firm Smaato, which has looked at mobile click through rates worldwide, based on the 6bn ad requests served through its network in April.
Worldwide mobile ad CTR
Click through rates for feature phones, less sophisticated (but still very popular) phones than smartphones, continued to rise during April, and performed better than iPhones, Blackberries and Android phones.
The most successful mobile OS in terms of CTR was Symbian, which is used in many Nokia and SonyEricsson mobiles:
US and Europe
There are significant differences in click through rates between the US and Europe. In the US, the Symbian OS dominates the market, with a CTR almost three times higher than that of the iPhone.
In the European market, Windows phones lead in terms of click throughs, closely followed by the iPhone, with Symbian in third position.
This underperformance from the iPhone OS may well have promoted Apple’s recent decision to launch the iAd network. Steve Jobs recently commented that a lot of mobile advertising sucks, and this new move will look to improve the quality and performance of mobile ads.