Eric Peterson has released a new whitepaper (sponsored by OpinionLab), titled The Mobile Measurement Framework: Making Sense of Your Mobile Efforts in the Context of Your Business. The result of the whitepaper is a rich set of key performance indicators focused on user experience, interaction, engagement, and costs that can be applied to mobile sites, mobile applications, and traditional web sites easily, effectively, and inexpensively. I had a chance to catch up with Eric to get his insight on his Mobile Framework.

[Manoj]: Give us a holistic view of the whitepaper.

[Eric Peterson]: Our Mobile Framework white paper provides guidance to marketers and business managers tasked with developing, deploying, and evaluating customer-facing efforts in emerging channels. The goal of the paper was to provide a reasonably deployed set of metrics that can be used to tie fixed Internet, mobile Internet, mobile applications, and other emerging channels together.

A nice aside is that this framework and our use of Interaction, Engagement, and Positive Feedback can be applied not only to channels but also to individual technology efforts within the business. For example, one Web Analytics Demystified client is exploring how this framework can be applied to their investment into video. Another is deploying these metrics into their Social Media efforts.

[Manoj]: How is capturing voice of customer different in mobile vs. the traditional web?

[Eric Peterson]: The challenge is that "capturing voice of customer" is pretty diverse on the traditional web, which speaks to our observation that Voice of Customer is really many different efforts (satisfaction scoring, feedback gathering, polls, etc.) Some of these strategies require asking lots of questions which works great on big screens but not so great on smaller screens. On small screens, and especially in mobile applications, the "ease-of-collection" bar is higher and so the response user experience is even more important.

This is one of the reasons we were excited to work with OpinionLab on the paper --- we think their approach is very sound and provides the easiest gateway to quantified and actionable information. Have a look at how Expedia.com has implemented their technology by way of example; you click "Feedback", provide a numerical assessment, provide direct feedback, and you're done.

[Manoj]: Do you think user experience is even more important in mobile?

[Eric Peterson]: I'm not sure I think it is "more important" in mobile. I think user experience is important ** everywhere ** and the challenge in mobile is that most companies are still working out what "good user experience" actually looks like. This is, of course, aggravated by the diversity of screens, applications, and platforms we reference in the paper --- "good experience" on iOS will differ from Android, Blackberry, Windows, etc. and so our point of view is that reasonable, directly comparable metrics that tie fixed web, mobile, and other emerging channel efforts together is very important.

[Manoj]: What are some of the most useful KPIs in mobile? (with the understanding it's contextually specific to the type of business)

[Eric Peterson]: Interaction, Engagement Rate, Percent Positive Feedback, and cost-related measures of each. Basically the bulk of the white paper describes our recommended key performance indicators for use in and across mobile and emerging technology efforts.

Wonderfully these are ** not ** contextually specific to business, mostly because it is incredibly difficult to create metrics that are business relevant that span these channels. For example, your web site likely exists to sell products, but your mobile site may or may not actually have a transactional component, your mobile app likely ** does not ** support transactions directly, and your SMS efforts almost certainly do not. In this case does it make sense to track "conversion rate" or "revenue per visit?"

Probably not.

Our point of view is that mobile and emerging channel efforts are going to happen and will hopefully be analyzed deeply based on the specific goal for each channel and technology type. The KPIs we describe in the OpinionLab paper power a higher-level view to let Executives compare the costs and relative response to each of these types of investments. With this data management can evaluate whether the level of investment in each channel is producing appropriate results (or if more investment or some other change action is required.)

[Manoj]: Will mobile users leave enough qualitative feedback on mobile in order for organizations to make educated business decisions?

[Eric Peterson]: Definitely. Have you had a look at Apple's App Store recently? People seem to take great delight in providing this type of qualitative feedback --- not always pretty, but often very useful. Even better, according to OpinionLab customers their mobile users are dramatically more likely to provide feedback, even if the absolute numbers aren't as large today.

Labels: Mobile Analytics, voice of customer, Web Analytics

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Labels: Mobile Analytics

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The web analytics experts who follow this blog are probably already fielding questions about analytics for mobile applications. And if you aren’t, you will soon. With 3 billion apps downloaded in the last 18 months (and that’s just for iPhone!) and almost 350 million mobile broadband subscriptions expected by the end of 2010, large brands and publishers are rushing to build mobile apps—and those apps will require mobile-specific analytic tools.

Localytics is a real-time mobile analytics solution that helps brands and publishers better understand their users, prioritize development, optimize marketing and generally make smarter business decisions. The open source iPhone, Android and BlackBerry client libraries can be integrated in just minutes. Highly granular data are collected and maintained, enabling dynamic segmentation analysis (e.g., device models by carrier), custom reports and daypart analysis. Of particular interest to web analytics experts, the detailed session-level data (not aggregated counts) can be exported for integration with Coremetrics, Omniture, Unica, WebTrends and others. A 1-minute video introduction and a fully functional mobile analytics demo is available.

Labels: Mobile Analytics

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“The use of Wi-Fi on mobile handsets is becoming pervasive,” said Frank Dickson, Vice President of Research with analyst firm In-Stat. ”By 2010, In-Stat anticipates that 20% of the total WiFi chipsets will be used in mobile phones as manufacturers, currently led by Nokia, continue to ship an increasing number of WiFi enabled handsets.”

“An increasing number of phones automatically recommend WiFi as the preferred connection choice when available,” continued Dickson. “The result is that subscribers are using the WiFi benefits of high bandwidth and often free access to take advantage of mobile services that were formerly only accessed via the cellular network. The market has spoken and the market likes WiFi.”

“Operator billing delivers the highest payment conversion rates for mobile content,” says Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango. “These Bango statistics are both a warning and an opportunity for mobile businesses to ensure their mobile billing solution can secure the same high conversion rates from the growing number of WiFi connected customers.”

Labels: Mobile Analytics

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For many years now the use of cookies on mobile has left you with a bad taste; they have simply failed to work reliably to provide mobile web analytics data. But times are a changing…

Where cookies have been naively used for mobile products, the tracking of website visitors has often delivered far from accurate results and in recent years have given results significantly skewed towards the latest smartphones where cookie support is good enough.

Today we see a much improved market thanks in part to the Apple iPhone phenomonon and the competitive catchup by other leading phone manufacturers across all their handsets. Mobile browsers have now become more fully featured with support for the latest media and content.

In the last 18 months, the majority of new handsets support cookies correctly. However, relying on cookies alone is still not the best way to understand and engage with your mobile visitors. Here’s why:

• To start with there are still millions of older handsets in the market that do not support cookies reliably. While this situation is improving daily, if you only using cookies you will still end up missing a large percentage of your customers.
• We must also look beyond the handsets and browsers to the operators and the chosen network connections. Some operators systems still assume that handsets don’t support cookies correctly; they therefore grab the cookie and store it on their gateway server rather than on the device.

This behavior causes a whole range of inconsistencies with consumer identification, especially now we see consumers moving between operator internet or WAP gateway connections and local WiFi networks. In that instance the cookie that was stored on the operator gateway is no longer visible from the WiFi connection, typically resulting in new cookies and a new identity being set.

Lastly, don’t forget that mobile delivers far more than desktop - it’s not the poor cousin. Mobile phones have their own identity and are usually associated with a single customer. Bango is able to leverage this fact along with a range of industry partnerships to deliver a visitor identification system far more advanced than simple cookies.

You simply ask us for your visitor’s identity through a simple, consistent Identifier API. We use data gathered from our relationships and a decade of mobile knowledge about devices and operator gateways to deliver a consistent user ID that can be relied on. The Bango User ID is the best way to understand and build a strong lasting relationship with each of your customers.

Labels: Mobile, Mobile Analytics

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• Bango Analytics is about understanding your customers and with v4.0 our user identity system provides a unique user ID for ALL visitors. This gives an acccurate total for unique visitors and let you drill down to see more informtion about visitor.
• You can now track unique visitors whether a mobile user connects via operator gateway, WiFi or home broadband - even if users change their connection, Bango still retains the ability to track them. Now everyone who interacts with a mobile website or mobile campaign has a privacy protected, unique user ID, no matter what type of network connection they use.
• New advanced filtering and sorting enables precise segmentation of mobile data, so it’s quick to get to the results needed on a case by case basis. Select to filter any report by page, country, operator, device, time or date.
• Unlike other analytics solutions, Bango Analytics works from your original “raw” data. We don’t pre-can reports and throw your data away. Our new data warehouse delivers even better performance and scalability, allowing us to record, enrich and report more information about your visitors.
• Bango Analytics lets you see metrics by the hour so you can understand how a mobile marketing campaign is performing in real time and make any necessary adjustments to ensure campaign success.
• Our device reporting now lets you view your visitors devices by manufacturer, model and version. Target your site or application to the most popular.
• Bango Analytics records all the parameters passed on the URL. Many marketing tools pass important information with the URL and by recording all this information, it available to you for analysis.

Labels: bango, Mobile Analytics

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Growing enterprise demand to measure mobile-based web traffic and video usage has spawned a promising new set of tools and methods which nonetheless remain fairly immature, according to new research by independent analyst firm, CMS Watch.

Traditional web analytics firms can typically analyze video starts, but cannot perform more advanced tracking -- such as capturing pauses, stops, rewinds, and duration of view -- without a significant amount of invasive coding within the videos themselves. New vendors, including Visible Measures and GlanceGuide, have developed systems to capture these events at the video player.

New analytics vendors focused on mobile metrics include AdMob, Amethon, Bango, and Mobilytics. However, established vendors such as Omniture, Coremetrics, and WebTrends all jumped into the mobile fray in the past year.

These suppliers can provide useful reports such as percentage of mobile visitors by screen size, handset manufacturer, and browser type.

However, like video, mobile metrics remains a very young and inexact practice. The biggest challenges revolve around data collection, since JavaScript and cookies (used heavily to measure web traffic today) are not accepted by a high percentage of existing phones.

Mobile device header data can provide useful information, but will vary according to manufacturer, device, carrier, personal preferences, and national regulations. "In particular, 'unique' visitor behavior remains an uncertain exercise," notes Kemelor.

Labels: CMS Watch, Mobile Analytics, Web Analytics

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“With 245 million subscribers, it was only a matter of time before the US became the number 1 country in the world for mobile web browsing,” said Anil Malhotra, SVP of Marketing at Bango. “When it comes to payments though, the US is accelerating faster than any other country and now accounts for 57% of payments worldwide.”

Labels: bango, Mobile Analytics, Mobile Marketing

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I really enjoyed Bryson Meunier's post last week where he compared traffic from mobiles using 2 different types of analytics: Traditional Web Analytics Tracking, Google Analytics and an actual mobile analytics solution, Bango Analytics. In order to accurately do this within Google Analytics, Bryson setup an advanced segment which captured traffic from mobile specific screen resolutions.

The results were amazing, Google Analytics was only able to capture 12% of the page-views captured by Bango Analytics. Only being able to capture 12% of Bango's page-views is mind-boggling me - imagine the type of insight you're missing out on if you're using traditional JavaScript based analytics software.

A word of caution, however: don’t expect an accurate count from Google Analytics or other JavaScript-based web analytics when it comes to tracking mobile users. I did a small-scale two week test on my homepage of Google Analytics relative to Bango Analytics for desktop sites and found that. Until Google Analytics and other JavaScript-based web analytics offer mobile-specific tracking, the only accurate method for tracking mobile users is to install mobile analytics.

Labels: Mobile Analytics

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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.

Labels: Mobile Analytics

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“In a rapidly changing business environment, marketers need to be able to make decisions quickly to remain competitive,” said Aseem Chandra, senior vice president of product marketing at Omniture. “With this release we continue to help our customers mobilize their marketing with on-the-go, real-time, on-demand access to analytics, further enabling our customers to make timely business decisions that can dramatically impact marketing effectiveness and return on investment.”

Labels: Mobile Analytics, Omniture, Web Analytics

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Helping companies monetize e-commerce via Web-capable mobile devices, Tealeaf®, today announced Tealeaf CX Mobile Experience Manager. With the addition of Tealeaf CX Mobile Experience Manager, Tealeaf delivers the industry’s first mobile session replay. The visibility mobile session replay affords is especially critical given the variability of mobile devices, and allows companies to understand mobile customer engagement, discover ongoing behavior patterns, and compare success and failure of mobile users alongside the experiences of traditional desktop users.

Tealeaf also announced several additional updates to the Tealeaf CX solutions, including enhanced Robot (bot) traffic reporting – to improve organic search rankings and affiliate marketing efforts – and new user community-driven event and analysis templates. These templates are packaged to provide Tealeaf’s customers and partners with best practices that further accelerate the time to value of Tealeaf.

Tealeaf CX Mobile Experience Manager

As more consumers rely on mobility, meeting expectations for mobile customer experience will be key to success in this new business channel. However, supporting Web transactions via mobile devices is very different than via desktops, and is dependent upon a company’s ability to effectively deliver content to varied devices and mobile browsers. Mobile Experience Manager offers companies full visibility and actionable insight into their customers’ mobile experiences:

Mobile Session Replay – Visibility Critical to Understanding Mobile Customer Experience

Mobile Experience Manager captures complete interactions of every mobile user without dependence on JavaScript or other mechanisms that can miss mobile interactions. The module can then replay an exact browser-level recording of each session, taking into account mobile variables including specific device capabilities, screen sizes, and other limitations (such as not supporting JavaScript). Insight revealed through Mobile Experience Manager is critical to discover and diagnose mobile site experience problems, compare mobile experiences with desktop experiences (or between devices), and ultimately improve success in this growing channel.


Additional Updates to Tealeaf CX Solutions:

Bot Traffic Reporting

Tealeaf also announced the addition of bot traffic reporting. Utilized by search and price engines for Web crawling and indexing, bots often make up a high percentage of site traffic.

Understanding bot behavior has been challenging however -- bots don’t accept JavaScript, making most Web analytics solutions unable to report on their traffic. With the new bot reporting capabilities, Tealeaf’s visibility is now extended, providing the unique combination of actual user traffic alongside bot traffic – including which bots visit a site, their frequency, and how they are traversing the site during each visit.

Multiple teams within an organization can benefit from better understanding bot behavior Insight into bot traffic sheds light on how product pages are getting indexed and ranked by a search engines—informing better search engine optimization decisions for emarketing teams. Understanding bot behavior can also help emarketers launch new product pages and update pricing—content companies want customers to find via organic web search. In addition, affiliate marketing programs can be enhanced through an understanding of how price crawlers and other bots are cataloging a site. And IT organizations can leverage bot traffic reports to help manage site traffic levels and protect against intrusion by “bad” bots.

"In the rush towards "more accurate" data collection companies around the world have managed to exclude as much as 50% of the traffic to their site from reporting and analysis," says Eric T. Peterson, web analytics consultant and author of Web Analytics Demystified. "Tealeaf's ability to record and report on traffic from automated agents and visitors using mobile devices allows site operators to develop a more accurate picture of what is happening on their web site.”

Labels: Mobile Analytics, Usability

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Labels: bango, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Analytics

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Clicky Web Analytics now lets you monitor your web site traffic remotely from your iPhone. As the global trend of access to information anywhere anytime continues, Clicky Mobile fits right in. Real-time analytics meets mobile flexibility.

In addition to the iPhone version, Clicky also offers a generic version for other mobile devices. The iPhone version takes advantage of the aesthetic and Javascript abilities. It looks great and feels like an application. Since Clicky Mobile is built off the WebKit platform, it will also work on the new Android phones when they are released, as well as any other mobile browser based on WebKit.

Just like Clicky, the mobile interface is clean and simple. It is more designed for that quick fix on the go, rather than a full substitute for the web site, but in that regard it delivers as promised.

The iPhone version even includes a its own Spy mode, which streams pageviews and other actions LIVE as they are happening on your web site. If you get more than a few thousand visitors per day, you can sit for hours and watch people use your web site live. It's a lot of fun and great to have that feature on the go.

Once you have registered and installed the tracking code on your site, just go to http://m.getclicky.com/ from your mobile device. It will automatically detect which version your mobile device supports and direct you to the right one.

Click here for a bunch more screenshots of the iPhone version in action.

Labels: Clicky, iPhone, Mobile Analytics

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Labels: bango, Mobile Analytics

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“The USA share of the browsing market has grown as an increasing number of phones come with bigger screens and service contracts that include unlimited Internet access,” said Adam Kerr, VP of Bango North America at Bango. “We fully expect the US will overtake the UK in this ranking as early as this month.”

“We predicted 2008 would be a pivotal year for the mobile web in the US, and our data is backing that up. Clearly the rate of growth and acceleration is getting faster in the US and around the world,” continued Kerr.

Labels: bango, Mobile Analytics, Mobile Marketing

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Millennial Media, the industry's largest and fastest-growing mobile advertising company, today announced it has integrated Bango's mobile analytics into its Decktrade marketplace platform. This move, further supporting Millennial Media's commitment to an open market, provides its Decktrade users with Bango's mobile analytics' service.

Bango Analytics will enable Decktrade users to accurately track unique visitors responding to mobile ad campaigns, providing the precise measurement and insight needed to optimize campaigns and maximize ROI. The integration of Bango Analytics into the Decktrade platform enables any advertiser to seamlessly add a Bango campaign tracking link to a campaign, thereby enabling accurate tracking of a variety of metrics including unique visitors, country, network and device.

Aimed at advertisers who recognize the power of mobile media discovery, lead generation and conversion, Decktrade is a performance-based, self-service network for mobile advertising. The network features a simple-to-use auction environment and multiple tools to make sure customers and publishers derive maximum value from the marketplace.

"Bango Analytics and Millennial Media's Decktrade advertising platform work in perfect harmony by offering customers a highly targeted mobile advertising solution and the ability to get the most accurate mobile analytics," said Ray Anderson, CEO, Bango. "This partnership gives mobile website owners the tools to target exactly the right audience across multiple markets and to increase their success on the mobile web".

Labels: bango, Mobile Analytics, Mobile Marketing

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• The daily/weekly/monthly number of unique visitors to your mobile website - 80%
• Conversion rates/effectiveness of mobile marketing - 71%
• New/repeat visitors - 58%
• Information about the handsets your visitors use - 54%
• Location - 50%
• The mobile networks used by visitors to your mobile website - 41%

To provide the highest levels of accuracy, Bango provides two different techniques for capturing mobile metrics – link tracking for campaign analysis and page tracking for site analysis.

The new site analysis feature is easy to implement - one line of html code is placed in each page to be tracked without the need to install anything on the server. A site summary report provides a high level view on the key metrics for a mobile website, including unique visitor numbers so it’s easy to see how the mobile site is performing.

Labels: bango, Mobile Analytics

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"It is very rewarding to be recognised by the industry for our role as a pioneer of the mobile internet. We've helped business of all sizes harness the new opportunities presented by this rapidly expanding market by providing a mobile content monetisation solution for the mass market." said Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango

"The aim of the MDAs has been to show how much world-beating talent there is in the UK for mobile data applications and technology, and this list of award winners does just that," explained Vice Chairman, Steve Reynolds. "Our winners have been able to demonstrate innovation and commercial success, which deserves this level of recognition."

Labels: bango, Mobile Analytics

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Mobile web surfers are riding high as Bango today announced it is processing on-bill payments in South Africa, one of the leading countries in the mobile web. South Africa, which is in the top five countries in Bango’s mobile web surfing chart, has over 42 million mobile subscribers and a mobile penetration rate of between 85-90% of the population.

In South Africa, mobiles are the only way for much of the population to access the internet. This factor, combined with an appetite for western content and mobile savvy users, are key reasons for the country’s high traffic growth. And with South Africa being such a dynamic market, both mobile operators and content providers are keen to reach out to millions of subscribers and capitalize on this great opportunity.

“Just as the UK has done, South Africa is embracing off-portal and understands the importance of having an open model,” said Anil Malhotra, SVP Alliances and Marketing. “We have a direct WAP billing with the leading South African operators, MTN and Vodafone ZA, to help grow their off-portal services and make it easier for consumers in this top mobile market to pay for mobile content.”

The new on-bill payment available in South Africa gives consumers a simple mobile web-based payment flow, with payment through a single click to their phone bill to deliver the best conversion, payout rates, security and customer satisfaction. More at www.bango.com/payment

Included in the Bango payment service is the Bango Analytics tool which collects data about mobile web visitors - where traffic is coming from, the network and handset. Using its Bango user ID technology it can also identify unique visitors and reliably distinguish between new and repeat visitors. More at www.bango.com/analytics

Labels: bango, Mobile Analytics

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