But in today’s modern world of advertising and the endless options of performance analytics, it is easy to get lost in a sea of data.

First and foremost, it is critical that you are in the right environment to reach your target audience. Location is everything. The environment in which your brand appears, determined by device, carrier, operating system, mobile Web, or in-app, absolutely has an impact on whether the right audience is seeing and interacting with your brand and meeting your KPIs.

Given the behaviors of today’s screen jumpers, it is also essential to consider media partners that offer mobile optimized environments. Whether it’s in-app or across the mobile Web, the environment of your advertising and marketing message is an extremely important decision in your marketing communications strategy.

Tablet and mobile devices open a whole new world of creative possibilities. The touch-enabled, rich media canvas of these devices can deliver an engaging and effective brand experience. Ads that include interactive features, compared to static media, are likely to drive higher engagement. HTML5 is emerging as a new Web standard for delivering interactive, cross-screen, device-agnostic creative. In fact, many major media outlets expect to have more traffic from mobile devices than from PCs in 2014, so marketers must strategically think “mobile first” now for creative.

Measuring Success
Mobile advertising analytics have come a long way recently due to the influx of ad spending, ad technology companies, and rich-media vendors. Gone are the days of static smartphone banner ads as extensions of your integrated or desktop media buys. We live in a new mobile world that is shifting toward programmatic buying and selling. This shift continues to evolve, and allows for a multitude of mobile analytics options that can be measured and enable performance.

So which analytics should be measured?

1. Viewability/in-view percentage: This refers to the number of ad impressions where at least half of the ad is in view for at least one continuous second. Our benchmark is to aim for 62 percent.

2. Active page dwell: This refers to the length of time a user was on the page with a browser window in focus. Our benchmark is to aim for 16 seconds.

3. Interaction rate: This refers to the number of actions taken for a particular creative execution, which can constitute swipes, touches, video plays, social shares, etc., divided by the number of impressions. The resulting percentage measures how much the viewing audience interacts with your marketing message. You want to aim for a minimum interaction rate of 1.8 percent and a universal touch rate of 7.34 percent.

4. Total exposure time: This refers to the total time, in hours, the ad campaign was active and visible summed across all users who have seen the ad for at least one continuous second. This is an especially interesting metric to compare across disparate media. As an example, a marketer can compare total ad time purchased on TV for a marketing campaign compared to the total exposure time from the same campaign’s digital components. The results would show which audiences and media partners were delivering the most efficient exposure time with their messages and brand.

As a marketer, the constant advances in technology have created an increasingly complicated and fragmented ecosystem to navigate. Focusing on core elements of strategy—objectives, context, creative, and analytics—will provide marketers a foundation on which to build effective campaigns using the best technology available.