Analytics on Mobile

“Teaching mobile to creatives is a lot easier than teaching creative to mobile folk,” said Ben Gaddis at T3 as this top integrated marketing firm launches a mobile division. And he has a point.

T3’s clients include brand heavyweights NBC Universal, Microsoft, Intel, JCPenney, Marriott to name a few. Ben Gaddis believes that for mobile programs to work, mobile needs to be integrated into the strategic thinking and planning right from the beginning.

According to Gaddis, mobile programs in Europe tend to get 10-15 times the level of interaction than similar US programs and that’s because the creative is better. You need to give a good reason for consumers to engage with the brand, why should they care?

“In the US, we’ve been too focused on understanding the technology but now that’s a lot easier, we need to let the ideas drive the campaigns. Mobile is huge, nothing else offers such a powerful one-to-one communication method.”

And, of course, when you do run your mobile campaigns, you definitely should analyze the results - did the campaign reach the target audience, how did people engage with the message and did the campaign deliver the level of interaction you were looking for? All this is possible with a suitable mobile analytics tool such as Bango Analytics. Find out more…

A report from the IAB this week confirms that mobile advertising in the UK bucked all market trends, doubling in size on a like for like basis in 2008, increasing by 99.2% year on year.

Over the last year CPM prices have come down a long way as the volume of ad inventory has increased but there’s no doubt the number of mobile ad campaigns has increased significantly. 

There’s some interesting facts in there:

• UK mobile advertising market was worth £28.6m in 2008
• Spend was evenly split between display and search marketing
• These first mobile figures correlate strongly with the early days of online advertising 10 years ago.

We know from speaking to our clients that search marketing performs better than display advertising but it generates fewer click-throughs as fewer people search on their mobile handsets than view display ads.

This report comes from a well respected industry body and adds a level of realism.  I  have a copy of the IAB’s very readable “Guide to mobile advertising” which is available online.  As always make sure you are using an independent mobile web analytics solution to measure success for all your campaigns.

For most of Bango’s 10 years driving the mobile web, the use of cookies has left you with a bad taste; they have simply failed to work reliably on mobile to provide mobile web analytics data.

But times are a changing…

Where cookies have been naively used for mobile products, the tracking of website visitors has often delivered far from accurate results and in recent years have given results significantly skewed towards the latest smartphones where cookie support is good enough.

Today we see a much improved market thanks in part to the Apple iPhone phenomonon and the competitive catchup by other leading phone manufacturers across all their handsets. Mobile browsers have now become more fully featured with support for the latest media and content. 

In the last 18 months, the majority of new handsets support cookies correctly. However, relying on cookies alone is still not the best way to understand and engage with your mobile visitors.   Here’s why:

• To start with there are still millions of older handsets in the market that do not support cookies reliably. While this situation is improving daily, if you only using cookies you will still end up missing a large percentage of your customers.
  
• We must also look beyond the handsets and browsers to the operators and the chosen network connections. Some operators systems still assume that handsets don’t support cookies correctly; they therefore grab the cookie and store it on their gateway server rather than on the device. 
  

This behaviour causes a whole range of inconsistencies with consumer identification, especially now we see consumers moving between operator internet or WAP gateway connections and local WiFi networks. In that instance the cookie that was stored on the operator gateway is no longer visible from the WiFi connection, typically resulting in new cookies and a new identity being set.

Lastly, don’t forget that mobile delivers far more than desktop - it’s not the poor cousin. Mobile phones have their own identity and are usually associated with a single customer. Bango is able to leverage this fact along with a range of industry partnerships to deliver a visitor identification system far more advanced than simple cookies.

You simply ask us for your visitor’s identity through a simple, consistent Identifier API. We use data gathered from our relationships and a decade of mobile knowledge about devices and operator gateways to deliver a consistent user ID that can be relied on. The Bango User ID is the best way to understand and build a strong lasting relationship with each of your customers.

An interesting study from Openwave on mobile internet usage highlights recent mobile advertising trends and points to the value of targeting.

The study points out that while AdMob served the most ads (nearly 7 times more than the nearest competitor), it also had the lower click through rate (CTR) in comparison to BuzzCity and Microsoft. 

Ads served by Microsoft had a 10% higher CTR, while ads served on the BuzzCity network were 100% higher. The study suggests that AdMob’s lower CTR is the result of too many generic ads that are not targeted or relevant to the subscriber.

This shows how important targeting is for any mobile advertising campaign - something that any seasoned marketer knows only too well.  We highlight this in a white paper on mobile advertising  within various social networking communities. 

Many of the mobile social networks are building an open, two-way communication and harnessing opt-in to collect socio-demographic data such as gender, age, location and in some instances what they want to receive advertising on.  This granular details goes a long way towards better targeting for the advertiser.

It makes sense to make the most out of mobile analytics offered by both the ad network and an independent vendor such as Bango to get as much detail about how your ad campaign performed in real time. 

See how many unique visitors responded to the campaign, from which countries, on which network and handsets.  Above all, see how many consumers converted and reached the goal you had set. All are delivered through Bango’s mobile analytics service, available now for a free 30 day trial.

At last, some research that tracks the intersection between mobile advertising and mobile social communities!

This white paper from Peggy Anne Salz, chief analyst at MSearchGroove, helps marketers understand how to effectively market to mobile social community members.

“Mobile Advertising for the Masses” highlights that in the personal world of mobile social networks, advertising that encourages two-way interaction between advertisers and consumers will be more successful than conventional “push” style banner ads.  The report suggests that virtual gifting is seen by many as the starting point for cultivating this two-way conversation.

It’s available for download at www.bango.com/whitepaper2 and you can see the results of the three ad campaigns featured in the white paper in detail on the accompanying Mobislim blog mobislim.wordpress.com, as measured by the Bango mobile analytics service.

Here’s what the author has to say:
“After testing mobile advertising on three mobile social networks - Buzzcity, Itsmy and Peperonity - the research clearly shows that demographic data they provide is essential as advertisers seek to develop dialogues with communities and deliver marketing messages sure to resonate with their members.”

“Clever mobile social networks even encourage their members to choose the ads they want, such as only ads about sports or fashion, making it possible for people to receive ads they find genuinely useful and interesting, as opposed to spam. No matter what the approach, it’s clear: A personal medium like mobile and an intensely personal space like a social network demand a much more personal touch from advertisers.”

Come and hear Peggy Anne Salz talk about this research at the AIME Seminar on April 2 in London. The topic of the evening seminar is “Mobile Advertising and the rise of Social Networking”. The folks from Bango will be there too so hope to see you then if you are in town.

It’s a tough nut to crack but the GSMA is going to tackle one of the biggest barriers to the uptake of mobile advertising - the lack of measurement capabilities.

Agencies and advertisers say they just don’t have the information needed for either planning or reporting purposes, and this puts mobile advertising at a disadvantage when compared with other advertising channels.

Five of the GSMA’s members: Vodafone Group, Telefonica O2 Europe, T-Mobile International, FT-Orange Group and 3 (Hutchison Whampoa) will define a range of metrics that will describe the mobile audience and measure the effectiveness of mobile advertising.

The reason why this is a tough nut to crack is the information will need to be cross-operator, cross-market, and also include both off-portal as well as on-portal sites.

Is this something that the GSMA members can achieve alone? It’ll need many different players in the market before such a complete set of metrics is available; it also needs a central organization to collect, deliver and audit this type of data.

Bango, alongside mobile operators and other third party vendors, has an active role to play here with its mobile analytics product in providing independent, real-time metrics on mobile websites.

One of its many applications is to give ad sales teams the metrics they need to develop ad-support revenues across a mobile site. This is data such as unique visitors, visits, page views and time on site, as well as mobile specific data such as devices, operators (including virtual networks) and countries.

For publishers and brands who want to monetize their sites, this is a invaluable information for their would-be advertisers.

You’d have thought that you’d be able to see how your mobile website is performing hour by hour but sadly that’s not generally the case. You can get this in the PC analytics world with the likes of Omniture - in the mobile world, only Bango gives you this level of granularity.

Mobile is the dream marketing device – a screen carried in the pocket of each of our customers 24/7. So in just the same way that traditional media, such as TV and newspapers, understand their readership or viewing patterns, can mobile web publishers see detailed readership patterns and trends across all their mobile sites and thus target content or price advertisements accordingly?

A quick look at my favorite mobile sites seemed to indicate not – something seems to be stopping time based targeting for content or ads and indeed a worrying lack of any personal targeting of any content. Don’t people know about the Bango Identifier? What are we missing?

Before I go and adapt my content according to time of day or start pricing my ads according to viewing patterns, I need to know my viewing patterns – who is visiting when and from where and my peak viewing times? It appears that this simple concept is not so simple for people to implement on the web in general, let alone with mobile. It comes back to where all good campaigns should start – the data.

A quick play with a number of mobile (AdMob, Mobilytics) and PC web analytics products (I’m thinking of Google Analytics here) quickly highlighted a major flaw – the data reported is simply not granular enough. Try it for yourself – pick your favorite mobile analytics tool and tell me what time of day you saw your main viewing peaks. Was it the morning and afternoon commutes or the lunch break?

Most analytics products only tell you about the last month or week or a daily level and cannot reveal the daily traffic patterns. Where a product lets you see a day, it only shows you a single total and fails to reveal what happened within that day – what point is a graph with just one lone point plotted?





Bango shows an hour by hour breakdown of your traffic. Bango records all events as Coordinated Universal Time which you can export to get a very fine degree of granularity.

This level of detail is fundamental to unleashing the full potential of mobile – whether you want to change content based on time of day and measure the response, or price your ads according to your traffic volume throughout the day. Choosing the right analytics solution appears to make all the difference.

Bryson Meunier quotes some interesting figures from a test he did with Google Analytics to detect mobile devices coming to his PC site, then compared this with Bango Analytics for websites. It seems Google just doesn’t cut it when it comes to mobile - Google only detected 12% of the mobile traffic that Bango measured.

Bryson set up custom segments in the latest version of Google Analytics in order to compare mobile traffic to desktop traffic. The custom segments are designed to detect common mobile screen resolutions and should give some sense of what visitors are coming to your site from mobile devices. 

Read the blog post to see the exact breakdown of the mobile traffic detected by Bango and Google. 

Bryson concludes: “Until Google Analytics and other JavaScript-based web analytics offer mobile-specific tracking, the only accurate method for tracking mobile users is to install mobile analytics.”

Maybe you’ve got mobile traffic coming to your website that you never knew you had.  Watch this video from Bango to find out more:

The new mobile FT.com launched last week has raised the bar when it comes to personalization on mobile.

Now users can customize what they see on their mobile device (Market Data etc) and then get to what interests them most when they return, without having to log in.

This is the first time that a publisher has offered such advanced personalization capabilities on mobile. While you can offer this functionality on the web using cookies, it’s much harder to do on mobile. That’s because most phones don’t store cookies and those that do, will often delete them when the phone is turned off or the browser session ends.

The FT uses the Bango mobile analytics service and in particular the Identifier to store the user’s preferences against their FT profile.

The User ID is the mobile version of a cookie but is specifically designed for mobile browsers with a persistent identity on all mobile devices and across multiple user sessions.

For more info on what the FT mobile service, there’s an excellent article on this by Mobile Marketer - Relaunched Financial Times mobile site identifies user profiles

Jitterbug Wireless is a great example of a mobile network with a clearly defined audience. This US-based MVNO is aimed at the baby boomers and older Americans who want a simplified mobile experience.

The phones are a basic, oversized, three-button design with all the complexity removed for a demographic that just doesn’t need it.

Jitterbug is a MVNO on the Sprint network as is Boost Mobile. The big difference is Boost’s audience is in the 18-34 age range, right at the other end of the age range.

It’s important though that your mobile marketing is targetted at the right audience. Bango mobile analytics can distinguish between users on the different MVNOs rather than seeing all visitors as just Sprint users.

This helps you build a complete picture of your visitor traffic - you can target your mobile marketing to a specific audience and then personalize the service you provide them once they’ve clicked through to your site. Bango identifies which network they are on so you can provide them with content appropriate to their needs.