Earlier this year, Opera Mediaworks introduced its global Mobile First Insights report, designed to help marketers navigate the quickly changing mobile environment and make strategic decisions that will drive real outcomes for their business.

But just as food, fashion and other trends are cultural, and vary by region, the way consumers use their mobile devices – and how marketers subsequently reach them on those devices – also differs across the globe. Specifically, there are clear differences between the data and behavioral trends in the Western regions, such as the United States, Canada, the UK and Europe, which still account for the majority of revenue and ad impressions served on our mobile advertising platform, and those of the Asia Pacific (APAC) region.

For instance, while globally the average session length for one of the Top 100 global apps that monetize traffic with us is 8.5 minutes, within the Top 100 apps in APAC it is 9.6 minutes. And mobile users in APAC are spending approximately 46 minutes a day in those top apps – that’s more than a 50% increase from the global average of 8.5 minutes!

These are some of the findings that are revealed in our Asia Pacific issue of the new Mobile First Insights report, customized to help marketers in APAC understand the local mobile landscape, which is one of the fastest growing regions when we look at year-over-year increase in impressions and revenue.

Within the larger APAC region, individual countries have their own distinctions, so we’ve produced custom reports for each of the following countries: Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Among the highlights:

Apps are on the rise – for good reason. In nearly all APAC markets, advertising revenue from mobile apps is eclipsing that from the mobile web channel – in some cases (Singapore, Thailand) as much as 13X. Across all markets, the click-through rates on apps are 1.3-2X higher than those on mobile web.

India and Indonesia are poised to join the app revolution. Though revenue from mobile web impressions still take the larger piece of the pie in these two markets, the shift to mobile apps is occurring at a rapid pace.

Games are no. 1 for impressions. In all countries excepting India and Indonesia, Gaming is the top mobile category in terms of traffic volume (as measured by ad impressions).

Health & Fitness rules for conversions. Across the board, the highest conversion rates were on mobile properties in the Health & Fitness category; in all countries except Australia, it took the no. 1 or 2 position, showing strong ROI for mobile marketers running ads in this category.

Click here to see more results from the Mobile First Insights report for the APAC region.