Mobile advertising and marketing in Europe - statistics & facts

Marketers’ behavior

European marketers seem to be trying to catch up with the global trend. More than 60 percent of marketers said their organizations had adopted a mobile-first marketing strategy. The share of marketing budgets spent on mobile has grown over the last few years, with 40 percent of surveyed marketers spending more than a quarter of their marketing budget on that channel most recently as compared to 10 percent in 2016. Additionally, two thirds were planning to increase their mobile budget in 2021. This means that the European mobile ad market is back on the growth track after being thrown off in 2020, when the market was impacted by the pandemic and 43 percent of marketers cut their mobile budgets.

Audience

European mobile marketing professionals can count on an audience of approximately 664 million people – that is the number of mobile internet users in Europe. According to industry estimates, another 21 percent of the population live in areas where mobile broadband connections are available, without using them. Once the usage gap is closed, the potential mobile audience could therefore grow by one fifth in the future. Mobile penetration rates are highest in Denmark, Norway, and the United States, where they stand at 90 percent, and the lowest in Ukraine and Russia, where they fall below 60 percent. However, marketers will have to work a harder to make their ads attractive for European users as half of them never take action on mobile ads. That is the second-highest value in the world, after North America, where it stands at 66 percent.

Largest markets

Europe is home to two of the five largest mobile advertising markets worldwide, the United Kingdom on place three and Germany, on place five. At approximately 14 billion euros, mobile advertising in the UK constitutes 56 percent of its digital ad expenditure. While this share is similar in Germany, the country’s total mobile ad spend adds up to less than half of the figure reported in the UK. Among the various mobile ad formats, both UK and German marketers invest most heavily in display ads (video and non-video). In the UK, the format accounts for nearly 40 percent of mobile ad budgets, whereas in Germany, the share stands at nearly 70 percent.

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