Mobile usage, and par­tic­u­lar­ly the use of mobile apps, has risen dra­mat­i­cal­ly in the past few years. How can brands bet­ter reach and engage con­sumers via mobile dis­play adver­tis­ing, or con­tent opti­mized for mobile, and con­nect with them as they are con­sid­er­ing, eval­u­at­ing, and trans­act­ing their pur­chas­es. The momen­tol­ogy team spoke to com­Score’s Adam Lel­la to find out more.

A new report from com­Score, The U.S. Mobile App Report, has high­light­ed sev­er­al fas­ci­nat­ing insights about the state of U.S. mobile app usage. One key find­ing is that total mobile app usage has surged 52 per­cent since 2013.

Last year, mobile first sur­passed desk­top in terms of total dig­i­tal media engage­ment. This year, anoth­er key mile­stone was reached – the major­i­ty of all dig­i­tal media time now occurs on mobile apps.

The report reveals that apps are the main fac­tor dri­ving the growth of mobile, and the func­tion users are uti­liz­ing the most. Here are 12 key sta­tis­tics from com­Score’s U.S. Mobile App Report.

12 Takeaways from comScore’s U.S. Mobile App Report

1. Total U.S. mobile app usage has surged 52 per­cent since 2013, exceed­ing the rate of growth in U.S. total dig­i­tal media time spent across all devices at 24 per­cent.
2. In the same peri­od, desk­top com­put­er usage has remained more or less con­sis­tent, ris­ing just 1 per­cent from 2013 lev­els.
3. Total U.S. mobile activ­i­ty includ­ing mobile brows­er usage, now accounts for 60 per­cent of total U.S. online media usage, with desk­top account­ing for the remain­ing 40 per­cent.
4. Apps dri­ve the major­i­ty of media con­sump­tion activ­i­ty on mobile devices, with users spend­ing an aver­age of approx­i­mate­ly 7 out of every 8 min­utes on apps.
5. For hand­held dig­i­tal devices, smart­phones have the high­est share of app ver­sus brows­er activ­i­ty, at 88 per­cent of total usage. Tablet app usage accounts for 82 per­cent of total usage.
6. The aver­age U.S. smart­phone user down­loads three apps per month. While more than one-third of all U.S. smart­phone own­ers down­load at least one app per month.
7. The total num­ber of app down­loads is high­ly con­cen­trat­ed with­in a small seg­ment of the smart­phone pop­u­la­tion. The top 7 per­cent of own­ers account for near­ly half of all app down­load activ­i­ty in a giv­en month.
8. 57 per­cent of smart­phone users accessed apps every day of the month, while 26 per­cent of tablet users did so. A much greater fig­ure of 79 per­cent of smart­phone users accessed apps at least 26 days per month, while 52 per­cent of tablet users did so.
9. A stag­ger­ing 42 per­cent of all app time spent on smart­phones occurs on the indi­vid­u­al’s sin­gle most used app. Near­ly three out of every four min­utes of app usage occurs on one of the indi­vid­u­al’s top four apps.
10. On aver­age, iPhone users engage with their smart­phone apps for nine more hours in a giv­en month than Android users.
11. The rank­ing of top apps is dom­i­nat­ed by app con­stel­la­tions of some of the largest dig­i­tal media brands; specif­i­cal­ly, Face­book, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Ama­zon, and eBay. These six brands account for 9 of the top 10 most used apps, 16 of the top 25, and 24 of the top 50.
12. Face­book is the num­ber one app in both audi­ence size and share of time spent among each of the dif­fer­ent demo­graph­ic seg­ments when bro­ken down, high­light­ing the breadth and depth of its pop­u­lar­i­ty and it’s impor­tance to the mobile media land­scape.

What Does This Mean For Brands?

Momen­tol­ogy inter­viewed Adam Lel­la (co-author of com­Score’s U.S. Mobile App Report) to fur­ther find out how brands should adjust their mar­ket­ing strate­gies to account for these changes in user behav­ior and device usage.

Momen­tol­ogy: What’s the biggest chal­lenge for brands look­ing to increase their mobile adver­tis­ing reach and ini­tia­tives?

Adam Lel­la: The lack of estab­lished infra­struc­ture and the chal­lenge of mobile mea­sure­ment. Mea­sure­ment is still catch­ing up with desk­top, and it is not ful­ly inte­grat­ed into the plan­ning and buy­ing process­es, although it’s improv­ing with prod­ucts like com­Score’s vCE Mobile cur­rent­ly in beta test­ing. At the moment, how­ev­er, mobile is still unproven to many adver­tis­ers, and they are still exper­i­ment­ing to find out which types of ads are most effec­tive on the medi­um, and still require more con­crete data on their mobile app cam­paigns before they are ready to com­mit larg­er por­tions of their bud­gets.

Momen­tol­ogy: The report also high­lights some fas­ci­nat­ing data about the most used apps, with Face­book stand­ing out as a pop­u­lar app across all age groups. Are brands under­valu­ing the poten­tial of mobile and social media adver­tis­ing?

Lel­la: Yes, to a cer­tain degree. Any­time there is an emerg­ing adver­tis­ing chan­nel, it will be under­val­ued at the begin­ning due to unfa­mil­iar­i­ty and that lack of infra­struc­ture I men­tioned. How­ev­er, giv­en the mas­sive audi­ence engage­ment on mobile (>60 per­cent of all dig­i­tal media con­sump­tion) and social media (25 per­cent of all time spent on mobile alone), these adver­tis­ing plat­forms should be gold mines for brands. And with the high sup­ply of con­sumers and rel­a­tive­ly low demand com­pared to oth­er medi­ums, this is actu­al­ly the best time for adver­tis­ers to spend on mobile and social media con­sid­er­ing the cur­rent low prices (read: high val­ue) of these ads.

Momen­tol­ogy: What should brands be doing dif­fer­ent­ly, or how can they improv­ing their mobile adver­tis­ing, pres­ence, and engage­ment?

Lel­la: Brands should con­tin­ue to test the mobile space and be con­stant­ly try­ing to dis­cov­er what works best for them. This starts with under­stand­ing how their audi­ence is engag­ing on mobile and what they need to do to reach them. They should also be exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent types of mobile ads and learn­ing what’s most effec­tive for them.

It’s inevitable that more dol­lars will even­tu­al­ly flow into mobile giv­en its large audi­ence size and strong grasp on con­sumers’ atten­tion, even if the dol­lars-to-atten­tion ratio nev­er reach­es a per­fect equi­lib­ri­um. Giv­en this fact, brands will be bet­ter suit­ed to start learn­ing about this adver­tis­ing plat­form soon­er than lat­er, espe­cial­ly if they want to avoid falling behind their com­pe­ti­tion.

Adam Lel­la is a mar­ket­ing insights ana­lyst at com­Score. He began his career as a mar­ket­ing per­for­mance ana­lyst for a glob­al brand in the quick-ser­vice restau­rant indus­try, where he devel­oped his exper­tise in inter­pret­ing and syn­the­siz­ing big data. Lel­la has a degree from North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty where he stud­ied com­mu­ni­ca­tions and busi­ness.

You can down­load com­Score’s full ‘U.S Mobile App Report’ here.

Is it time for brands to turn up their mobile adver­tis­ing efforts. Let us know your thoughts in the com­ments below.