Analytics on Mobile

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to catch up with Vikrant Gandhi, Sr. Analyst at Frost & Sullivan who extensively covers the Mobile & Wireless Communications space. 

In our discussion, I posed the following questions to Vikrant: How important is it to measure for mobile and will this importance increase in 2009?  Below is a summary of Vikrant’s response:

As is with any new opportunity in telecom, initial service monetization is largely based on qualitative perceptions of the opportunity. With mobile, we first see small trials before the stakeholders commit fully to a service or an opportunity.

Since mobile phones deliver highly personal services, it is important to determine what services are preferred - under what circumstances - by different customer segments. What we now need is more of a quantitative set of information.

The mobile phone is not a communications-only device anymore (am sure you have heard this multiple times). At any time, the mobile subscriber has access to a ton of information, communication and entertainment content (provided one is willing to pay for these). Text messaging is ubiquitous, mobile Internet usage is increasing tremendously and even 3G is gaining continual traction.

The mobile industry likes to point to traffic statistics to justify the investments that go into new infrastructure roll-outs, and to prove the case that the mobile phone is really a converged device. However, more often than not, important metrics or statistics are NOT shared publicly, and for years we have heard about the ‘tremendous growth in mobile Internet’ etc. How can one validate this?

Mobile advertising is expected to become a significant revenue stream within the next 2 years. The buy side is used to Internet-based advertising models,  and one cannot blame them for feeling frustrated for not getting enough visibility into what’s going on. Right now, one has to fully commit to a campaign to see what the results are - there is not much prior sharing of information that can validate the opportunity. 

There are certain technical challenges to doing this as well - for example, it is difficult for independent , third parties to identify a unique subscriber of mobile Internet. Mobile operators sometimes have some competitive relationships with their own partners and may sometimes be disinclined to share much info.

To sum this up, it is extremely important to be able to measure the performance of the mobile channel… starting with the three most used data services - Messaging (SMS and MMS, A2P and P2P), WAP  (this is very important to promote mobile advertising) and premium mobile content services (on-deck and off-deck). As traffic grows even more in 2009, the industry needs a common set of guidelines around how these are reported. It will only add to more confusion if different operators report on the same thing but in a different way…

Guest blog post by Manoj Jasra of Web Analytics World.

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