Analytics on Mobile

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.

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website