I’ve been saying it all along. If Flurry would have just kept their mouths shut, all would be fine. I knew that opening their mouths about the iPad was what pissed off Apple. What kind of idiot grabs a baseball and starts swinging it at hornets nest??

“We’re seeing  about 50 iPads and they are all coming from Cupertino, CA… Blah.. Blah.. Blah…” –

Jeez, what were they thinking letting Apple and everyone know publicly that they are combing other app developers data and that Apple is testing iPhone apps on iPads.

Blame Flurry, Jobs said at D8 on Tuesday night. That’s the analytics company that sent Apple (AAPL) “through the roof” when its software helped it peer into Apple’s iPad testing operations in January. So now, Jobs says, he’s cutting out Flurry and everyone who wants to track his customers’ gadgets by transmitting device-specific information. (Jobs was responding, by the way, to a question from First Round Capital’s Chris Fralic, a Flurry investor. Ouch.)

Take a look at the speech: http://d8.allthingsd.com/20100601/d8-video-steve-jobs-explains-his-iads-restrictions-and-blames-flurry/

Well here we are, and now that Pinch and Flurry are one company, they are both screwed!

So here’s my question. Can developers built their own analytics? Can developers track how their apps are used?

Of course they can!

While Apple can easily block the ability to identify what kind of phone it is, they can’t, nor do they want to, block tracking how the apps are used.

While Apple can block third party analytics providers from sticking their nose in app developers data, they can’t, nor do they want, to block app developers from understanding who their users are.

Is it really that big of a deal if we don’t know what type of phone it is, or what version they are on? That’s what Apple is concerned about. That and developers / providers opening their BIG FAT MOUTHS and sharing information.

As we all know, Apple’s always had a non-disclosure with their beta software, etc… and it’s always been honored by developers.

So what’s the answer??

is the answer!

While I continue to be pissed at Flurry, I plan to write them a public thank you letter next. By pissing off Apple, they have opened the market and forced developers to install their own Analytics, Reporting and App Tracking!

And we have it!

We have created stand-alone versions of the AppClix software. It comes in 3 versions from single server personal to multi-server enterprise.

Simply install AppClix on your own server (or rent a turn-key one from us) and go! Connect your apps. You have control and only you have access, and your data is not being mined or looked at by third party reporting companies.

And here’s the kicker! We are developing interfaces so you don’t have to change ANY code in your applications. Simple replace the Flurry, PinchMedia, Localytics (and others coming soon) library with one single line of code and you are GOOD TO GO! You can be up and changed over in days.

And you can even IMPORT your existing data using the PinchMedia API or Flurry & Localytics exports.

So bring it on! Our AppClix free trial will be ready next week and we plan to work over the weekend to get the finishing touched on the installed.

Come and Get It!!!

Visit our site for more info and pricing. We will be offering a migration special shortly.

 

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One of the things we have found over the last 6 months, is how many people don’t understand why mobile specific analytics products are needed.

Both from an accurate tracking and marketing perspective, mobile analytics can make a huge difference in your everyday business decisions.

I’ve put together an in-depth white paper that is the “everything you need to know about mobile analytics” of white papers, to explain what this is all about.

In it I cover the following topics in detail:

• Brief history of web analytics
• What makes mobile different, and why traditional analytics won’t work
• What mobile web analytics is
• What to look for in a solution provider

Without getting too technical, I explain how vendors do their tracking, and what the pros and cons of each are. I do not compare the specific vendors, only the methods they use for unique id tracking. No vendors are mentioned, and it is not a “sales pitch” oriented paper.

At the end of the day, anyone evaluating a solution should put the tracking code from multiple vendors on their site and review the results. The process of viewing the reports in the vendor’s interface, and the report data will speak for themselves.

Download our Actionable and Accurate Analytics on the Mobile Internet white paper, and let us know what you think. Pass it along to others as well.

Our goal is to educate the public, and to collect information that will make Mobilytics an even better product than it is.

 

At Mobile Internet World a few weeks ago, I was particularly impressed by one member of a panel I had attended. Bob Walczak of Ringleader Digital appeared to be a “tell it like it is” kind of guy, and I found him extremely refreshing and entertaining.

Well apparently I was wrong. He appears to be more of a “Tell it like you want them to think it is” kind of guy.

Bob has publicly taken credit for a “new” technology they invented called “media stamp”. The weird thing is that it sounds exactly like the process we use to uniqely identify users for our analytics. This technology was discussed at a Mobile Monday panel I sat on back in April that Bob attended.

Since cookies and Javascript are rare on mobile browsers, we developed a way to create a unique fingerprint for users without them. Essentially we take all the information we receive from the carriers, all the information we have about the phone model and it’s capabilities, and other information derived from the actual browsing experience, to create this fingerprint.

We then provide each unique ID with a score from 1–100 which gets attached. The score is based on how sure we are of the uniqueness of the user, and how sure we are that we can identify them when they return.

While any claim that Bob makes that he can 100% identify unique users is false, we can still uniquely identify a very high percentage of unique users. This is why we give them a score.

In a press release yesterday, Ringleader made the following claim:

By “stamping” a mobile device, Ringleader Digital enables agencies and brands to identify unique visitors and track their clicks, impressions, and acquisitions across all browsing sessions, mobile sites, and wireless carriers. Media Stamp is the first technology to standardize these ad serving and analytic capabilities in mobile, which were previously only available for online advertising.

Sorry Bob, you were not the first, and you knew it.

“The potential of mobile advertising has been constrained because agencies and publishers have not had the real-time visibility or analytics required to validate the return on investment for mobile ad campaigns” said Bob Walczak, CEO of Ringleader Digital. “Media Stamp is reinventing mobile advertising by quickly gaining a strong understanding of user preferences and enabling mobile advertisers to provide targeted, relevant advertisements to growing and active mobile audiences.”

“Reinventing” is an appropriate term for what Ringleader has done, since we already invented it. Mobilytics is still the only “impartial” third-party ad tracking tool that can use this fingerprint to track “across” ad networks.

Conversion tracking capabilities from Media Stamp analyze how impressions/click results are connected to actions. Media Stamp can also associate the user’s behavior to each page that included a specific served ad – enabling publishers to identify all pages that contributed to a visitor’s conversion. Ringleader Digital is also expanding Media Stamp capabilities to enable real-time delivery of targeted ads by correlating behavioral and engagement patterns to deliver targeted and actionable advertisements.

While it is great to see them using this technology on the ad-serving side, we have been doing it with ad campaign tracking for over 6 months.

You can see Ringleader’s press release here.

I need to go check on our patent application…

At first glance I was kind of excited to hear about this white paper. But when the title page loaded with the Bango logo on it, i realized what it was. While I don’t want to take anything away from the exhaustive work that Peggy Anne Salz did on this, it is just not in my personality to stand by while more questionable information is spread.

Peggy does mention in small print that Bango is a supporter of her blog, but I’m not sure who they think they are kidding with this. Clearly this is a lead generation tool for Bango that she was probably paid to write. In order to download the white paper, Bango requires you to fill out a form so they can hit you up with relentless auto responders and drop you in their sales pipeline. This is fine, but let’s not pretend it is something else.

Since most of you will not want to hear from them, I thought I’d just share the link so you can skip that step and download it directly.

The white paper can be downloaded from here.

First let me say again that Peggy put a lot of effort into this, and I applaud her for that. It looks like ti took a lot of work.

So let’s dig in a bit…

On Page 12, she states the following:

I chose Bango and AdMob as two best examples of analytics packages on the market today.

In the campaigns below, I also show the procedure for inserting the campaign tracking code.

Peggy is definitely aware of Mobilytics, and I have to think there is a deliberate reason she did not include us. Probably because the simplicity of our campaign setup would make Bango’s stand out as cumbersome, confusing and limited. Or maybe because I haven’t had the nicest things to say about her employer.

Bango – Pretty straightforward. Sign up for a mobile analytics account, and get your individual tracking number. This uniquetracking link - which points to the URL of your choice – essentially follows and records user interaction with a particular landing page, event, campaign or conversion.

What she is saying here is that you create a Bango URL that you send the traffic to (for example: http://bango.net/id/?bango=111555001168&register=n), that then forwards the traffic to your landing page. So for each ad or keyword you want to track, you need to setup a Bango URL and put them in your ads on all the networks and sites that you are advertising on.

Talk about turning a negative into a positive!

She then states the following:

In my case, because my campaign URL already contained a “?”, it was a matter of trial and error to get the click-through URL up and running. News to me: The standard procedure for passing values within the URL - such as the name of my campaign – requires me to know that these values should be separated with &. However, a “?” in my URL and in the piece of code AdMob asked me to tack onto my URL, stopped this process short. To complicate matters, an issue in the original code provided by AdMob, and which I added to my mobislim site (this is a procedure AdMob requires as a rule), was revealed to have a deeper flaw that effectively caused it to ignore the very value I wanted to track. Fortunately, teams at AdMob and Bango found a solution and it’s back to business as usual.

This is unbelievable. With Mobilytics, you simply put a parameter at the end of your landing page URL. We can use your existing tracking code if you have them already. No need to setup the links in Mobiilytics before placing the ads. We automatically create the campaigns when the traffic comes in.

So these are the two “Best Examples” of mobile analytics products out there. One requires you to create individual forwarding URLs for every thing you want to track BEFORE setting up your ads. And the other doesn’t work if your URL already has a ? in it.

She also mentions how AdMob is updated nightly, and how Bango is real-time. What she fails to mention is that AdMob provides a ton of data than Bango doesn’t. It’s like comparing a hit counter to Google Analytics. Realtime is easy when you are not calculating referrers, search engine keywords, paths through the site, exit pages, entry pages. Let’s compare Apples to Apples at least. The reason Admob and Mobilytics is not real time (although we are only 1 hour delayed), is that we take the time to mine the data and make sure it is correct.

This is my favorite part:

(As I explained earlier in this section – the Mo’Jiva campaign in Bango started later, so I opted to use earlier data referring to an identical campaign titled October Mo’Jiva.)

What she is basically saying here is that she did not run the analytics solutions together on the same page views, which basically removes any credibility from this comparison whatsoever.

The aim here is not to compare how well my three campaigns performed. For that I would also need to acknowledge and address a laundry list of do’s and don’ts around Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Actually, this is false! If you wanted to compare the Analytics products and the campaigns, all you needed to do was put the tracking code from both analytics vendors on the same page. The reason you could not do this, was because Bango forces you to use their URLs for landing pages. Since Mobilytics can use ANY url for campaign tracking, it can easily be compared to AdMob or Bango. And of course you want to compare the different ad networks and how the campaigns performed. That’s the whole point of campaign tracking. I’m not sure what she means by having to acknowledge a “laundry list” of SEM and SEO do’s and don’ts.

What I find ironic though is that she has definitions of Search Engine Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization in boxes on page 23, which are the two things that Bango is not capable of tracking. If someone visits your site from a Google, or Yahoo organic mobile search, Bango is not capable of tracking that, or telling you the search phrase. That’s their biggest flaw. They only track referrers from “Bango Links”.

All and all she did a fine job putting together a primer on mobile advertising and analytics. It would have served the industry better though if it had not been designed as a marketing tool for Bango, and showed some real comparison data.

Let me just share some advice to those of you out there interested in mobile advertising and organic search engine tracking.

Do your research. Put more than one vendor’s analytics code on your site for a short period of time and compare them. Once you lock yourself in to a vendor, you will not want to switch. It’s that simple!

We all offer free versions and free trials. Take advantage of that time to make an informed decision driven by results and accuracy, not the vendors marketing budget.

 

I couldn’t resist. I came across this today on the Support Analytics blog. I thought the timing was ironic.

A little lighter side for a Wednesday!  I Hope you got a chuckle out of this one, like I did.

Warning: Don’t try this at the office.  Fictitious numbers can lead to a lack of income/employment, divorce (if applicable), and ultimately, complete distress. 

You can’t just make this stuff up!

For almost a year now we have been building and refining what I believe to be the most complete and accurate analytics solution for mobile. During this period, two major mobile industry players have stepped up with products of their own. While I was concerned about the Bango product initially, I realized quickly that their product has about 10% of the benefits and capabilities of ours. While they have been able to use their name, reputation and cash to infer that they have a more robust product then they have, customers quickly find out that things are really a bit different. Adding a feature like “Unique Visitors”, something that should have been there from the start, and acting like it is some kind of brilliant new idea doesn’t fool anyone. But it got me thinking….

In my now 18 years of experience with the Internet I have clearly learned two things. The first one of which I need to get better at.

KEEP IT SIMPLE! - Next to my desk, stuck on the wall is torn out sheet of notebook paper that simply say “Keep It Simple”. When our minds start to come up with great ideas and features, I look at that sign, record the idea and remember that the goal is to get a working product out with minimal feature that can be easily upgraded on a consistent basis. That’s why we build web based applications. Well apparently I need to get better at this.

The other day we were on a call with one of the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturers. After an hour of talking about Mobilytics I received a response that I have heard now more than once.

“We can really appreciate the level of thought and detail you put into the development of this product.”

Well that’s nice to hear. What I am not so sure about though is whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Is it a good thing that I can’t sleep at night if one single visitor to a mobile web site is not properly tracked? Is it a good thing that I don’t want the system to go down EVER? The truth of the matter is that we could have officially released Mobilytics back in January by only including the Dashboard. This was still 90% more data than has ever been available on mobile users. But was that the answer?

Well apparently it was! Just Look at Bango and AdMob.

I spent an hour in a webinar yesterday given by AdMob seeing their complete product. I’ve also been playing with Bango and have been through their webinar as well.

Half way through the AdMob webinar it hit me like a ton of bricks. Apparently keeping it simple does not just mean holding off on enhanced features. It means much more. There are a number of things that our competitors have done (or not done) that we could have done to get to market over 6 months ago. I want to point out a few of these.

1. Leave out the very feature (Unique Visitors) that makes the product necessary in the first place (BANGO) - We could have simply done away with Visitors and Pageviews and simply used Visits. It worked for Bango! This is of course the main reason for mobile analytics, and the one issue that has taken the most resources and time to develop accurately. Leaving it out was not an option.

2. Hide the inaccuracy of the data by not showing the detail needed to even know the data is inaccurate! (AdMob & Bango). This one dawned on me during the AdMob webinar. When we present our product, we are always asked about our percentage of accuracy. My answer is always, “we have no way of knowing”. As far as I am concerned, if we can tell somehow that the data is inaccurate, then we can build a system to do the same. That’s exactly what we have done!. If you can eyeball the raw data and see an issue, then our servers can. So the answer is that we are 100% as accurate as we can possibly be given the information and technology available. We have taken incredible steps to identify unique sessions and visitors. What I suddenly realized yesterday was that the reason we need to be so accurate is that we are showing our users the information that will make it obvious if it is not!

We show every single page view individually as well as every visitor, their path through the site, their phone, carrier, country and detailed information, as well as all other visits from that visitor. We show how much money that visitor has spent on the site, what their average monthly spending is, and what their conversion rate is. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

During the webinar it occurred to me that with Bango and AdMob there is no way to prove the information is inaccurate without accurate detail to compare to. And they don’t provide it!

When asked how they identify unique visitors, Omar, the CEO of AdMob danced a bit around the issue, mentioned something about http headers, and used the word “proprietary” to put the question to rest. Bango talks about their “unique identifier” whatever that is. We assign a unique id to every visitor. When they come back, we know it is a return visitor. Yes there are situations where this is not possible. That is because of the limitation of wireless. We all live by that constraint equally. Even Bango’s “unique identifier” will not work in these cases. You can’t ask the user for their phone number each time they visit the site.

So how would you know if the data was wrong? If the report says you have 765 visitors, who are you to question it? How would you know? Well in our case, we show you each visitor and what they did. It will be painfully obvious if the data is wrong. Should we have left this out? Apparently we should have.

3. Stick the word UNKNOWN or UNDEFINED in whenever we don’t know, rather than try and figure out WHY we don’t know. (AdMob & Bango) - UNKOWN?? This is more of the same. How can it be unknown? That’s just an excuse for “we haven’t figured out why we don’t know what this is.” Every visitor to a mobile web site is coming from an ISP in a Country using a Browser on a Phone. How can it be unknown? In our case there is only one case for unknown and that is when an error occurs during the identification of the handset. In that case we label it as “Pending ID”, and it is reconciled with a nightly update. While we might not have details of the capabilities of a phone model right away, we can give the phone a name rather than lump it in with the other unknowns. When details are available, they will be updated.

Let’s take this one step further. When I mentioned in a previous post about how Bango was showing my Blackberry 8800 as “Unknown”, I was given this response by Glenn Walker of Bango:

Interestingly, you accessed the link on a Blackberry using the default internet connection, rather than the specific WAP gateway, hence then unidentified entries.

What he is really saying is that I accessed the Internet through a Blackberry Enterprise server (like 90% of Blackberry users do), and they are not able to identify users that way. What a crock! First of all it should not matter how I access the Internet, you should still know I am a Blackberry. The UserAgent does not change based on how you access. Secondly, the issue with Blackberries is that they all show up from Canada which is where the Blackberry servers are. So here’s the difference in our products. Bango marks it as “unidentified”, while we spent considerable time building a Blackberry specific tracking module that can identify the real carrier and country. Ask them how they handle sites like Skweezer, the Google wireless transcoder, Mowser, Yahoo, Opera, Vodaphone transcoder and other exceptions. I already know the answer. Don’t show the details and nobody will question it.

Here’s the top 3 phones according to Bango for our test site:

Unclassified? Opera Mini? - These are not Handsets!

Here’s ours:(click to zoom):

These are Handsets! To show 10% of all visitors as “unclassified” is not acceptable by my standards. Even for a “Free” version.

And here’s AdMob’s Operator Report from their demo:

Bango:

And ours (Click to Zoom):

4. Show Less information needed in exchange for Cool Graphs and Interface Animation (AdMob & Bango) - We designed Mobilytics as a tool that can show our users the information they need with the least amount of clicks, and with the least amount of effort. Fast loading pages with limited “fluff” while at the same time using AJAX, pop-up Javascript and other technologies that help us to reach that goal.

Trading fancy animation and graphics for detail, accuracy and ease of use was not an option for us. Our screens show at least 50% more information in a single place than Bango and Admob and do so without cluttering up the page. AdMob has taken up the entire “above the fold” of the screen with a single graph that moves and grooves while showing one-tenth of the information we show in the same space. Their fancy navigation takes up the left side of the page, valuable real-estate that we use to show important details.

Bango’s spinning wheels and fancy colors make a nice view of the “23% unclassified operators”.

And ours:

Let’s compare the Dashboards:

I think the pictures speak for themselves.

In the amount of time they spent on fancy Ajax gizmos, they could have made the data more accurate and made the reports more useful. We’ll go into a detailed comparison in another post.

And Lastly for today-

5. Uptime Shmuptime, if it goes down, blame it on our hosting provider (Bango) - This one amazes me. As soon as we realized the incredible number of pageviews were getting, we took a step back and changed our back-end to take advantage of scaleable cloud computing. Downtime is NOT an OPTION. If Amazon’s Computing Cloud should go completely down, we can still track all the data in our other data center and process later. This took us 4 months to re-architect. I suppose we could have just ignored it and got to market faster, but again this was not an option.  Bango has been down a number of times recently which not only brought down the analytics, but it brought down our site as well since we used the Bango Links in our menus and ads. All of these issues in the last month affected Bango analytics.

• http://bangoserviceblog.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/analytics-resolved/
• http://bangoserviceblog.wordpress.com/2008/06/16/analytics-update-2/
• http://bangoserviceblog.wordpress.com/2008/06/13/bango-analytics/
• http://bangoserviceblog.wordpress.com/2008/06/12/analytics-live-issue-resolved/
• http://bangoserviceblog.wordpress.com/2008/06/11/analytics-live-issue/
• http://bangoserviceblog.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/system-status-update/
• http://bangoserviceblog.wordpress.com/2008/05/22/service-update/

The point of this post was not to attack our competition. (Although I can’t resist showing this screen shot showing 202 unique visitors with 292 unique handsets. Someone tell me how that’s possible!)

The point was to communicate the differences in the commitment to excellence between us. Rather than take the easy way, we have built a product that “keeps it simple” while at the same time provides so much more with a level of accuracy that we believe is unmatched.

To us it’s about the accuracy of the data and the usefulness of the tool. Fancy graphics, animation, expensive PR firms, inaccurate data, and missing features are not our answer to delivering a quality, usable product.  Even a free one!

 

Bryson Meunier, product champion for natural search at Resolution Media has a post this morning on DMNews that is a must read for anyone looking to use mobile for marketing their products and/or services.

Mobile has been the “next big thing” in marketing for a few years now.

That pretty much sums it up… We’ve been talking about it being the “next big thing”, but clearly some things need to be put in place before that can really happen. Bryson discusses some of them in his post.

The bottom line is that marketers need to have a valid business reason for entering the space. From a mobile search perspective, success in the long-term requires defining your business strategy. Are you looking to drive sales? Just looking for impressions? What are your key performance indicators for measuring success? This is a time for experimentation, but without a plan for success you may be doomed to fail.

He touches on 3 areas:

• Your Mobile Website - The importance of making it search engine friendly, and tailoring it to the “mobile user”. Give the user what they need, when they need it, quickly and simply is what I have always said. Bryson touches on this and more.
• Mobile Analytics - Desktop analytics will not work on a mobile site. The data will simply be wrong. Use mobile specific analytics like Mobilytics to take advantage of the accuracy and mobile specific features.
• Track and Log Everything - I like this one. One thing we have learned is that simple changes to a web site or content can drive up (or down) conversion rate. Keep track of the changes that you make from the analytics data you have. Keep a log.

Finally, keep a log of everything you do. Get positioned for long-term success by learning from your short-term gains. Don’t just set it and forget it with mobile. Keep a log of every content change and inbound link to better understand how each affected the overall campaign.

Bryson has also listed some great mobile search engine resources on his site that are worth getting to know. I am posting them here as well to help spread the resources. Thanks for a great list Bryson!

Mobile SEO
Blogs, tools and other resources related to search engine optimization for mobile
devices. Listed alphabetically.
Bena Roberts - Mobile SEO News
Bena has her finger on the pulse of all things mobile. This is her blog for mobile search optimization and advertising news.
Cindy Krum - Rank Mobile
Cindy is a popular speaker on the local mobile conference circuit and a member of our
mobile SEO group. Email Cindy at cindy.krum@bluemoonworks.com.
David Harper - Different Things
David is the founder of Winksite and one of the founders of Mobile Monday NY. He spoke on their mobile SEO panel in June of 2007.
Find Resolution - Mobile Search
The mobile search category of the Find Resolution blog has all of the articles that I’ve written on mobile for our company blog.
Google Webmaster Help - My mobile site in the Google index
Official word from Google on developing Google-friendly mobile sites.
JumpTap Mobile Keyword Tool
The only mobile-specific keyword tool that I’m aware of. Also see How to Find the Jumptap Mobile Keyword Tool, as it’s not an easy feat.
Mobile Marketing Association Mobile Search Use Cases
Helpful for understanding how a mobile user searches, which can be helpful in SEO.
Mobile Search Optimization White Paper
Permanent home of the white paper Resolution Media released to help brands achieve visibility in the mobile search engine result pages.
Mobile SEO Google Group
Started by Paul Bennett, this is a great resource for sharing best practices for mobile SEO. By invitation only.
Mobility.mobi
Mobile SEO section of the popular forum for mobile developers. I often post on the subject.
Nadir Garouche - SEO Principle
Nadir blogs often about mobile search and mobile SEO. Also a member of the mobile SEO Google Group.
Paul Bennet - Mobile SEO UK
Paul occasionally writes on mobile for Marketing Pilgrim and at this blog. He is the owner of the aforementioned mobile SEO group.
Pelle Boese - SEO Mobile (German) (English Translation) - Pelle is a German Mobile SEO, a member of our Google Group and the developer of the Serendipity mobile plugin.

Mobile Development and Design
A few good resources to help developers develop mobile sites, and to make web sites more accessible to mobile users.
Cameron Moll - Mobile Web Design Book
The best resource on mobile web design that I know of. Price is obscenely low for the quality of the information contained within.
Dev.mobi Mobile Web Developer’s Guide
Dotmobi official resource for mobile web designers and developers. Free.
w3c Mobile Validator
Mobile best practices checker from the w3c.

Mobile Analytics
For descriptions of all of these mobile analytics solutions, please see my Mobile SEO’s Guide to Mobile Analytics.

Mobile Web Analytics Blog
Mobilytics
AdMob Mobile Analytics
Amethon Solutions - Site Edition
Bango Analytics

Give his post a read, and visit his blog for a lot more information on the subject.

This morning I was catching up on some back blog posts from Dennis Mortensen’s Visual Revenue Blog. Dennis was the former COO at IndexTools, Inc. which was recently purchased by Yahoo! Congrats to all at IndexTools. Looks like Yahoo is going to take a run at Google Analytics.

Dennis is now Director, Data Insights at Yahoo.

My new function will very much be around driving and evangelizing the Analytics strategy for Y!, so envision a more commercial version of Avinash or a less British version of Ian or the nemesis of Omniture if you will… ha ha.

I’m glad to see he will be continuing the blog and staying in the industry. I personally found his blog way too late and wish I had been reading it longer.

In the post I was reading this morning, Dennis makes a table that shows how IndexTools complies with the Web Analytics Association’s published terms and definitions. Since Mobilytics is a member of the WAA and this was a recent topic, I thought I’d do the same. I know they did not have Mobile in mind when they created this document, but let’s see how we stack up.

 

Term: Page

Compliant

A page is an analyst definable unit of content.

 

Term: Page Views

Compliant

The number of times a page (an analyst-definable unit of content) was viewed.

 

Term: Visits/Sessions

Compliant

A visit is an interaction, by an individual, with a website consisting of one or more requests for an analyst-definable unit of content (i.e. “page view”). If an individual has not taken another action (typically additional page views) on the site within a specified time period, the visit session will terminate.

note: We have set timeout to 10 minutes since mobile web pages are much smaller. If you have not viewed a page in 10 minutes, it is a new session.

 

Term: Unique Visitors

Compliant

The number of inferred individual people (filtered for spiders and robots), within a designated reporting timeframe, with activity consisting of one or more visits to a site. Each individual is counted only once in the unique visitor measure for the reporting period.

note: While we filter spiders and robots, we show them in the campaign page and on certain screens. The purpose of this is to identify if spiders are clicking on ads you are paying for. Lack of Javascript leads to spider ad clicks.

 

Term: New Visitor

Compliant

The number of Unique Visitors with activity including a first-ever Visit to a site during a reporting period.

 

Term: Repeat Visitor

Semi-Compliant

The number of Unique Visitors with activity consisting of a Visit to a site during a reporting period and where the Unique Visitor also Visited the site prior to the reporting period.

note: While we track this, and the value can be calculated easily by the user, it is not displayed on our dashboard. This will be added.

 

Term: Entry Page

Compliant

The first page of a visit.

 

Term: Landing Page

Compliant

A page intended to identify the beginning of the user
experience resulting from a defined marketing effort.

note: Mobilytics currently does not distinguish between landing pages and other pages. Our goal and campaign tracking can use any page for a landing page. Also, and Entry Page and Landing Page are the same.

 

Term: Exit Page

Compliant

The last page on a site accessed during a visit, signifying the end of a visit/session.

 

Term: Visit Duration

Compliant

The length of time in a session. Calculation is typically the timestamp of the last activity in the session minus the timestamp of the first activity of the session.

note: Mobilytics uses the term “Avg Time per Visit” which is the total time divided by the number of visits during specified period.

 

Term: Referrer

Compliant

The referrer is the page URL that originally generated the request for the current page view or object.

note: Mobilytics uses “Referring Site” for this term

 

Term: Internal Referrer

N/A

The internal referrer is a page URL that is internal to the website or a web-property within the website as defined by the user.

note: Mobilytics does not currently use “Internal Referrer” as a term.

 

Term: External Referrer

N/A

The external referrer is a page URL where the traffic is external or outside of the website or a web property defined by the user.

note: Mobilytics also uses “Referring Site” for this term

 

Term: Search Referrer

Compliant

The search referrer is an internal or external referrer for which the URL has been generated by a search function.

note: Mobilytics uses “Search Engine” for this term.

 

Term: Visit Referrer

Compliant

The visit referrer is the first referrer in a session, whether internal, external or null.

 

Term: Original Referrer

Semi-Compliant

The original referrer is the first referrer in a visitor’s first session, whether internal, external or null.

note: This info is available on screen as the referrer from the first visit. We plan to put it on the “Visitor” screen which already exists.

 

Term: Click-through

Compliant

Number of times a link was clicked by a visitor.

note: Mobilytics also uses ”Clicks” for this term.

 

Term: Click-through Rate/Ratio

N/A

The number of click-throughs for a specific link divided by the number of times that link was viewed.

note: Mobilytics does not track external ad impressions, only clicks. We also do not calculate click-through rates on internal and outgoing links. We recently added outgoing link tracking and this is being added.

 

Term: Click-through

Compliant

Number of times a link was clicked by a visitor.

note: Mobilytics also uses ”Clicks” for this term.

 

Term: Page Views per Visit

Semi-Compliant

The number of page views in a reporting period divided by number of visits in the same reporting period.

note: Mobilytics uses “Avg. Pages/Visit” and ”Pages/Visit” for this term. We will standardize on a single term asap.

 

Term: Page Exit Ratio

Compliant

Number of exits from a page divided by total number of page views of that page.

note: Mobilytics uses “Exit %” for this term.

 

Term: Single Page View Visits (Bounces)

Semi-Compliant

Visits that consist of one pageview.

note: Mobilytics tracks this and uses for “Bounce Rate” but does not display total. We will add to interface.

 

Term: Bounce Rate

Compliant

Single page view visits divided by entry pages.

note: Mobilytics calculates this as the number of bounces divided by the number of visits. Result is the same.

 

Term: Event

N/A

Any logged or recorded action that has a specific date and time assigned to it by either the browser or server.

note: Mobilytics does not currently use the term “Event”. It is being added as we integrate tracking of downloads, sms, installed apps, outgoing links, outgoing ad tracking and other non-page content.

 

Term: Conversion

Compliant

A visitor completing a target action.

note: Mobilytics uses “Goal” as  the action taken to trigger a “Conversion”.

Well that’s it. I’d say we are pretty compliant. Let’s get the same info from some of the other mobile analytics products as well. The more transparent we are about how we calculate and define metrics, the better the user can understand what they are seeing.

Thanks to Dennis Mortensen for a great post and simple display of the standard terms.

 

 

MobiAd News is a great newsletter to read about the mobile advertising industry. They do an excellent job of covering the industry in general, and are an excellent source of information.

Yesterday’s lead story was about using advertising standards to support the growth of mobile ads. I agree completely. Advertisers will not be ready to throw serious budgets into mobile without understanding what the consumer is experiencing, and what they are getting as a result.

We need to define a common understanding of what will be delivered to users which is consistent, regardless of which operator is managing the network. It is vital that the value chain for all players involved be clearly defined and expectations and inter-relationships between players fully understood in order for the business to flow freely and the lofty ambitions for this industry be fully realized.

While I have mentioned the need for standards in tracking mobile ads, there is obviously a need for standards for delivery and content as well. With so many different browsers, having a few standard ad sizes like on the web is not possible. Also, with new more powerful phones arriving every day, we are no longer just talking about simple banner size issues.

Standards to date have mainly focused on web browser and banner adverts but this is changing to multimedia advertising and video in particular. Estimates from Juniper Research state that SMS campaigns currently account for the largest proportion of mobile advertising budget; with nearly 1.5 billion mobile users receiving SMS advertising in 2008. But the increasing popularity of mobile TV services mean that ad spending in this area will rise from just $335 million in 2008 to more than $2.5 billion in 2013.

Both the OMA and the MMA have taken a role in defining these standards from both a technology and a user experience standpoint.

According to the article, a key priority for the MMA is to define metrics that will allow advertisers to uniformly monitor the effectiveness of mobile ads. That is also a key priority for Mobilytics. Not only do standards metrics need to be defined, but the industry needs to be able to compare and analyze all types of ads across the different mobile channels.

Work carried out with ad agencies and advertisers has revealed a need to educate and assist when it comes to mobile advertising. A lack of understanding means that the potential for this diverse and flexible medium is not being realized by key players in the value chain. And to make the process more seamless, a high degree of interoperability and standardization is needed

About 60% of Mobivity’s clients use SMS for marketing purposes. Some of those clients also do banner advertising, have a wap site, and do SMS campaigns with other content providers. You can imagine how a lack of standards and cross channel tracking can make understanding the data difficult.

Using Mobilytics, an advertiser can see how each channel, publisher, or ad version is performing against each other, and how each medium (sms, wap, banner, video,in-game) stacks up.

Without this information, advertisers will never put serious money into mobile. Gone are the days of “I know half of my advertising money is wasted, I just don’t know which half.”

Accurate metrics, combined with industry standards and guidelines are needed to legitimize what is unquestionably the most personal marketing medium there is to reach the consumer.

The mobile handset offers tremendous benefits to advertisers as the only personal device offering interactive, highly targeted advertising that benefits both advertiser and consumer. The secret to unleashing this potential will be in getting the balance right and ensuring that all parties enjoy a positive and rewarding experience - I believe that the definition of industry guidelines is a key step along the road to making this happen.

 

I’m sitting here with 3 LCD screens in front of me with database queries, spreadsheets and browser windows open trying to determine how accurate Mobilytics is.

Let’s forget about mobile for a minute and just talk about web analytics in general. Before factoring in the complexities of mobile, I wanted to get a reference point where I could say that Mobilytics was correctly tracking a regular Internet web site.

Since we are not using JavaScript, this would be a great test of the accuracy of our server side snippet code in general.

So I decided to compare Mobilytics to a few web analytics products out there which I will not name. I will say that one of them is Google Analytics though. The problem with Google is that I can’t drill down to individual visits to compare page view by page view.

So here’s what I came up with. NO WEB ANALYTICS PRODUCT WILL EVER BE RIGHT!

It’s just not possible. There are too many opportunities for minor issues to impact the data. The real question is, how would you know if it was right anyway? And how good is good enough?

Here I am on a Sunday morning comparing my raw log files and database queries side by side with 2 other web analytics products. I placed each product’s tracking code on the same Internet web site, so you would expect them to match up.

Not the case. And I’m not just talking about general numbers and percentages. I am auditing individual page views one at a time. While I can understand the occasional duplicate appearing, or the time on the page being off,  how is it that I have visitors in my data that don’t show up at all in this other vendor’s product?  The one particular visit that led me to blog about this is coming from the U.S. on CabelVision using Firefox. So why would it not be appearing in the other product?

One thing I can think of is that Web Analytics rely on JavaScript and Cookies. Maybe this visitor turned them off? Well since we are using server side tracking code, we have the complete HTTP headers and other info so I can easily check. (doing this now), be right back…

Ok so here’s what I found. Clear evidence of a visitor who came through a referral link on a blog, and is not a crawler or search bot of any type. While I can’t tell in this case if they have cookies turned off, you would think with Firefox that would not be the case. But let’s assume it is. Wouldn’t we at least register a visit?  Not only did I lose a visitor, I lost a referrer, a page view, and I would never have even known. What if I am an advertiser and I am paying to attract visitors? Is it ok for one to be completely missing?

Who else is reviewing logs and comparing vendors to see how accurate they are? Now I wonder  how often this happens? I’m only reviewing a 1  hour period on a single day.

On mobile we can’t rely on cookies and Javascript, why does the wired web take them for granted? I guess the same way we need to discard data sometimes in order to maintain the integrity of the data, the web vendors do also. It just seems to me that there is no reason you can’t use an image tag and Javascript.

And just to be clear, I don’t even know if this is the reason the visitor was missing. I will be looking further though.

So the simple conclusion I have drawn from hours of comparisons in general is that putting the numbers side by side will NEVER match up exactly. At some point they will vary. But there’s no real way the average user would know anyway.

I’m looking forward to putting a few of the mobile products side by side and seeing how we stack up. The quality and accuracy of the reporting is the single most important thing we are focusing on, and that is what will make Mobilytics the leading third party analytics and tracking solution for mobile content. Why else would I be comparing single page views and HTTP headers on a beautiful Spring Sunday?