GSMA makes welcome move to provide metrics for mobile advertising

Measuring mobile advertising -
a tough nut to crack

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.