Mobile Analytics

According to Nielsen Mobile the adoption of the mobile web has reached a critical mass. Nielsen says that, as of May 2008, 15.6 percent of mobile subscribers in the US make regular use of the mobile Internet on their devices, totaling some 40 million subscribers. This is just a subset of the 95 million US mobile subscribers who pay for access to the mobile Internet (through data plans or some other setup) but don’t use it quite so regularly.

Despite such a surge in mobile internet usage business are lacking in measuring the mobile traffic. A recent survey by Omniture found that 71% of businesses are not measuring mobile traffic to their sites. It also found that 50 percent of businesses do not even know how many unique users landing on their sites originate from a mobile device.
Measuring Mobile internet traffic, also called “Mobile Analytics” is not easy, we are still dealing with the accuracy issues with web analytics and now Mobile analytics provides its own set of unique challenges.

Judah Philips in his post on Metrics insider covers a comprehensive list of challenges that Mobile Analytics faces.

Some of the key challenges he lists are

• Data Collection –JavaScript is the most common way of collecting data for web analytics, but not all the mobile browsers execute JavaScript.
• Unique visitor identification – due to lack of cookie support and the changing of IP addresses it is a challenge to uniquely identify a user.
• Traffic source detection – Determining the source of traffic, such as search, email, direct entry, RSS feeds, and marketing campaigns can be challenging in the mobile space.
• Geographic identification – Where are the visitors viewing your site coming from? But not all devices enable geographic detection because the gateway’s IP address is used, not a GPS signal.

Mobile Analytics Solutions

A lot of Mobile Analytics solutions have sprung up in past year or so and more are coming up (See my prediction for 2008). Some of the established web analytics vendors are also now offering Mobile Analytics solutions. These solutions widely differ in their technology, process and capabilities. Which solution will work for you will depend on your needs (In future I might compare some of these vendors on this blog, but meanwhile if you would like help in evaluating a solution you can email me at batraonline at gmail.com). Below is the list of current mobile analytics vendors that I am aware of.

• Admob
• Amethon
• Bango
• Coremetrics
• DeckStats
• mobileStats
• Mobilytics
• Motally
• Nedstat
• Omniture
• Tigtags
• XiTi

Other Resources you might be interested in

• The challenge of mobile analytics – Part 1
• The Challenge of Mobile Web Analytics
• Mobile Analytics: Omniture and Bango
• Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Advertising Revenue to Surpass $2.7 Billion in 2008

Did I miss any tool/solution? Email me at batraonline at gmail.com

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Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra
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Mobile Analytics: Omniture and Bango

Earlier this year I predicted a few developments in Web Analytics and Behavioral Targeting Space. One of them was the rise of Mobile Analytics.
Here is what I predicted:

Mobile Analytics – Mobile sites and mobile advertisings gain momentum. Mobile Analytics will be become a requirement to understand how the sites and advertising are performing. Currently you can either use log files, WAP gateway logs if you are one of the mobile carriers (this is what I did back in 2001 -2002) or services from Amethon. This year we will see more players in mobile Analytics. The reporting will become better than what has been offered to date.

Two recent press releases are proving that I was right in my prediction, one is from Bango and another from Omniture.

According to destinationCRM, a research has found that between 20 percent and 30 percent of overall Internet traffic is generated by mobile devices. In this article Matthew Langie, Omniture’s senior director of product marketing said that the need for a mobile-analytics solution was clear: Clients were requesting this capability, and research alone has shown that consumers are readily using mobile phones, with subscriptions at 3.9 billion in 2008 and predicted to reach 5.6 billion by 2013. (Individuals, it’s worth noting, may have multiple subscriptions.) A recent study by market research firm IDC predicted that 164.7 million smartphones will be shipped worldwide this year — a figure expected to reach 363.2 million in 2012. Moreover, while 2007 saw 27 million phones with Wi-Fi capabilities, the service will reach 400 million by 2012.

According to a research by Bango, the most important feature requested by mobile site owners was “The daily/weekly/monthly number of unique visitors count”

However, capturing an accurate number of unique visitors is not easy in Mobile sites as not all of the mobile phones accept cookies and users share the same IP address (network address) and this IP also changes as users roam. The new offerings from both these providers claim to provide an accurate count of unique visitors. It remains to be seen how accurate they are. It is interesting that both of these providers announced their offering on the same day.

Bango

Bango unveiled new mobile site analysis capability to help website owners measure the value of mobile sites by accurately counting unique visitors browsing their site. This new capability in Bango Analytics, v3.0, complements existing campaign analysis functionality .
Bango uses a privacy protected Bango User ID to count and track unique visitors. The Bang User ID is compiled through sophisticated WAP gateway profiling, data from browser analysis, session information and network interactions. This unique user ID enables Bango to distinguish between new and repeat users and therefore precisely quantify the number of unique visitors.
Source : MarketWatch

Omniture

Omniture announced availability of Mobile Analytics in Site Catalyst version 14.1. According to an article on destinationCRM Omniture’s effort to address the most common problems marketers face when tackling the mobile arena includes the following four features:

• In a partnership with mobile Internet advocate group dotMobi and its DeviceAtlas database, SiteCatalyst communicates with an extensive library of device profiles to accurately identify the mobile device accessing a Web page. This determines what video, audio, and text can be displayed, thereby giving marketers insight into what customers are using most frequently. Moreover, carrier identification gives marketers the ability to partner with carriers to set up other campaigns.
• Through the use of visitor identification technology such as cookies, subscriber identification, or header information, SiteCatalyst can identify a new visitor or a repeat visitor to deliver an experience akin to the traditional Internet.
• The solution aims to capture the right data from a variety of devices to garner insight about the page. Omniture’s server places on each Web page a very small file that occupies a single pixel, allowing marketers to track the activity of the mobile device: where the user is clicking, what content is being downloaded, what video is being watched, etc.
• A geolocation component that recognizes where the site is being accessed from, thereby enabling Web publishers to deliver advertisements applicable to that location.

As I predicted earlier this year, Mobile Analytics will gain more momentum in the coming months and I will be writing more on this subject.

Thank you Sarah Dawson for helping me with this post.
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