Wednesday, October 08, 2008

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.


Other Resources you might be interested in

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

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position? Try WebAnalytics Job Board

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:56 PM

    Anil,

    Yes mobile analytics does provide its own set of challenges particularly when uniquely identifying users. To address this, Bango developed its user ID, compiled through sophisticated WAP gateway profiling, data from browser analysis, session information and its billing relationships with mobile operators. More at http://analyticsonmobile.com/

    I hope you'll have time to evaluate Bango's mobile analytics on your blog some time soon. In the meantime if your readers are interested in the inside track on setting up mobile ad campaigns and using analytics to measure results then they can download the "Mobile Advertising for newsbies" white paper at http://bango.com/whitepaper.

    Sarah Keefe, VP Marketing, Bango

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous9:27 AM

    Hi Anil,

    Openwave recently announced a service for analyzing mobile traffic:

    http://www.openwave.com/us/services/mobile_analytics_service/

    We've been doing this for years and our tools and products for analysis have matured along with the growth in traffic. A big % of the global mobile data traffic goes through our gateways so we have a unique view of all the elements in great detail.

    We've traditionally focused our efforts in working directly with the mobile operators to build strategies for launching and monitoring new services and products. As off-deck traffic (and interest) grows, we'll partner with those content publishers to help bridge the gaps between standard web analytics tools and what we can provide (location, device, uniques, etc).

    --
    Sean Horgan
    Sr.Manager, Software Engineering
    Openwave Systems

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi, Anil,

    With the success of its beta launch of myRT Mobile (http://myrt.auriq.com/mobile/jp/) in Japan, with over 2000 registered users and over 40 million visits per month in less than a year, AuriQ Systems is venturing into the US mobile web analytics market.

    myRT Mobile US (http://www.myrtmobile.com) provides mobile marketers and site owners key insights about their mobile web visitors including which carrier networks they use, types of devices, and their capabilities. Being able to segment visitors by device features such as their display sizes, streaming capability, or GPS tracking function helps mobile web marketers identify trends in the mobile device market and allow them to customize their marketing strategies to take advantage of these features to increase visitor engagement and conversion.

    Eugene Xiao, Product Manager, AuriQ Systems

    ReplyDelete
  4. I never even thought about the mobile traffic my site could be recieveing, that is really interesting. I guess that is part of the internet usage population that can often be overlooked, espcially considering that it is not as easy to track!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous8:29 AM

    I would stay away from Amethon. Product is very expensive and there is ZERO support. The problem is there are only 4 people there.

    ReplyDelete

I would like to hear your comments and questions.