Well this one works out well for us. Amazon has lowered the cost of data transferred out of their servers, and have kept all transfer between their services as free.

We are generating a tremendous volume of log files from all the data we are tracking. The nice thing is that we do ALL the processing within the Amazon cloud until the last possible moment when we download it to our Windows reporting servers. We then compress it and store on Amazon S3. By the time we download it, the data is 1/5th the size of the original. Cha Ching! Hey every penny counts… Now if we could just get them to support Windows servers and we’d never have to leave the cloud.

Thanks Amazon!!

A few weeks a go I was contacted by Bryson Meunier who has a blog about mobile search engine optimization and natural search. He was putting together a post about mobile analytics and wanted to include Mobilytics.He released that post yesterday, and we are very pleased with it. In the post he looks at the 4 mobile analytics vendors that are in the market today. Of the four, only 2 of us are really complete stand-alone analytics packages, and we are the only one that can be used by everyone from tiny budget-minded mobile webmasters, to the major mobile web portals.

From what I’ve seen, Mobile Vision’s Mobilytics is in a position to become the Google Analytics of the mobile web. Mobilytics is similar to Bango and GetMobile Analytics in that it’s a hosted solution, and like both Bango and Amethon in that it offers mobile marketers a wealth of data about how their mobile web sites are used. The difference, and the reason why Mobilytics might catch on faster than the others, I think, is that they offer free mobile web analytics to anyone willing to put a small text ad on their site, regardless of the number of page views. This is likely to appeal to small business owners with the branding flexibility to do this, and other mobile marketers who are not convinced enough of the need for mobile-specific analytics to increase their budgets for them just yet.

In terms of their product offering, Mobilytics is competitive with both Amethon and Bango in the sheer number of data metrics that they offer marketers and the accuracy of their data relative to traditional web analytics. Like GetMobile Analytics, tracking is done through a widget of code that captures information about the server

He also points out some of the issues that our competitors face.

Amethon:

Requires a dedicated server and is not for small to medium budget sites that are on shared hosting platforms. It could also be an issue for enormous sites that are using server farms and load balancing since it can become a bottleneck.

Don’t own a server? Don’t start salivating just yet. Amethon bills their Site Edition as being ideal “for large mobile content publishers ”, meaning smaller to mid-size companies without the mobile budget might find their solution less than ideal. Tracking for Amethon works by switching the traffic from a mobile analytics server to a web server and requires additional hardware installation, necessitating a certain level of commitment of resources that many small businesses might not be willing to make just yet.

If you want to be up and tracking your complete mobile web site and marketing campaigns in minutes for minimal or no cost, Amethon is not the solution for you.

GetMobile Mobilizer:

In my opinion, GetMobile is not really an analytics solution. Their product is a mobile web site builder with mobile stats built in. They also lack many of the tracking features and metrics needed to really understand your site and visitors.

As part of their mobile site creator they offer mobile analytics to give webmasters a better sense of what’s happening on their mobile sites.

The problem with GetMobile analytics at the moment is not accuracy, but rather the lack of actionable metrics with regard to the mobile search engines. For SEOs, there’s not much here currently that could aid them in benchmarking, tracking and optimizing a campaign.

Bango Analytics:

Well my opinion of Bango has been publicly stated. While Bryson mentions some of the issues with using Bango, he does not address the fact that it is not a complete solution. Simply put, Bango is not a stand-alone mobile analytics solution that can provide all of these metrics, and track mobile campaigns and SEO easily. They require you to redirect your visitors to a Bango URL on the way in. It does not work with natural organic search, and does not track pageviews, search engine keywords, content paths, and many other needed analytics.

Bango is a good solution for users of their e-commerce services who want to track conversions and get details about their customers. We do all that and more. And we don’t require you to redirect the URL.

One possible problem with Bango Analytics with regard to SEO is the way that mobile users are tracked. Currently Bango tracks mobile users by temporarily redirecting them to a Bango.net site, where data is collected on the handset, search terms, etc. before they’re sent back to the client site. This is done so quickly that it doesn’t affect the user experience, but it could affect the overall link popularity or the crawlability of the site. I simulated a spider crawl on several of Bango’s mobile clients, and it doesn’t seem to be an issue with regards to crawlability, but it’s something to look out for if you decide to select Bango Analytics as your mobile analytics provider.

Essentially what it comes down to is that Mobilytics is a complete solution that combines the best of all of these solutions in a single package. Bango’s complete system is covered in our Campaign Tracker module and Amethon’s “on the wire” data capture is covered by our optional IIS and APACHE custom logging modules (more on this soon).

We are also launching a mobile web site hosting & web site builder solution that will provide server based, detailed, accurate stats without the need for page tagging. More on this to come as well.

We’re very excited about the future, and look forward to adding our next round of beta testers next week.

Nice job Bryson! Thanks!