Hour-by-Hour Sales Impact of Mobile Advertising

Abstract

Mobile technology offers a unique opportunity to reach consumers at the time and place they are most receptive to messages. Yet, marketers are uncertain about which hour of day mobile advertising is most effective. To answer this and identify the causal impact of advertising on sales, our study builds on two large-scale randomized field experiments with 19,200 mobile users. We identify that consumer purchase response varies on an hour-to-hour basis throughout the day and that these hourly effects interact with product type and framing. The first field experiment reveals that mobile ads for utilitarian products are most effective during morning hours, peaking between 10:00 am and noon. In contrast, ads for hedonic products are most effective during the afternoon, peaking between 2:00 and 4:00 pm. Our second field experiment replicates this finding with a single product but different ad copy framing manipulations. Ads with utilitarian framing are found to decrease the odds of consumer purchases on mobile devices by 80%, holding all else constant. Compared with naive industry approaches, optimally framed mobile ad copies can boost purchase rates by 71.8%. These findings not only support the hour-by-hour mobile ad effects, but also make a novel contribution by demonstrating how framing a product as either utilitarian or hedonic generates substantial differences in mobile ad effectiveness. Field experiments can eliminate the confounds of consumer heterogeneity and endogenous biases when identifying the causal but subtle advertising effects in real-world purchases. Marketers should optimize hours of the day, ad copy framing, and consumer segments to enhance mobile ad effectiveness in the field.