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!

First let me start by thanking those mobile web sites that are currently participating in our beta, and those waiting for their invites.

Beta testing has been a part of software development since the first software was created. Contrary to what many “Web 2.0″ companies think, beta testing has a purpose other than just being an excuse for having bugs.

While we can create mock data and test features in-house, there is nothing like real data and users to find the faults, stress the system, and solicit valuable feedback. This is the reason for beta testing.

About a week ago, we put the invites on hold while we began implementing a solution to an issue that I was uncomfortable with. I won’t get too technical in this update, but will do a blog post about the system architecture sometime soon.

As an entrepreneur, I find it extremely valuable to get my web site analytics data as close to real time as possible. Two of my goals when designing a mobile web analytics product were to deliver analytic data within hours rather than next day, and to be able to add hundreds of millions of pages views without affecting that time frame.

Soon after we added our first large beta tester, we realized that we had a scalability issue when processing the raw data we receive from our customer’s mobile web sites. While it worked great for smaller sites, many of the calculations and processes were taking way too long, and it was not scaling well. Adding more sites and pageviews added too much time to the processing of the data.

I immediately began to architect a better way to process that data, and it appears to have made a huge difference. While our reporting servers and web site are Microsoft ASP.NET and SQL Server based, we have moved our data collection and analytic processing to a Linux based platform, utilizing Amazon’s EC2 elastic computing cloud, S3 storage, and SQS web services.

A successful hosted web analytics product can have a database with billions of records, and will receive many millions of hits per day from all over the world. For those of you that are not technical, Amazon’s web services allow unlimited growth by providing “virtual” servers and unlimited storage. Adding a mobile web site to our service that gets 100 million page views per month is as simple as turning on a few additional virtual servers.

Virtual Servers can also be used for analytical data processing, and can be turned on and off as needed based on the load. If one of our customers all of a sudden gets a huge spike in traffic, we automatically turn on additional servers, and turn them off when they are under-utilized.

At this point our data collection process has been completely moved to Amazon. Additionally, we are in the final stages of development and testing of our new coding and import process.� This is the process that takes the raw data and moves it to our reporting servers for display in our interface and also makes it available through our web service.� We have moved it from a C# .Net & SQL Server application, to a Java based app that can run on Amazon’s servers and can scale up as needed. Using Amazon’s SQS service, the system can monitor the load and add more servers and processors as needed. If we see that the average time from collection to reporting is more than a few hours, the system simply adds more servers.

The next stage of the beta testing will be to begin increasing the incoming data next week so we can see how it is working. We expect to send out about 25 invites next week and 50 the week after. If you have not filled out our survey, please do now. Two of the important questions� are the number of page views per month your site receives, and what web technology is used for development. Don’t worry if you have very little traffic.� We are adding both large and small sites to the mix. Customer feedback is every bit as important as load testing.

I look forward to adding more testers and rolling out the best mobile web analytics product. Thanks for all your help and feedback!

Whether or not you are interested in beta testing, please do fill out our survey. It has help us build a better product, and we will be releasing the summary results after our official launch out of beta.

Click Here for our Survey. It only takes a minute.

Princeton, NJ (PRWEB) February 7, 2008 — Mobile Visions, Inc., a leader in mobile messaging, marketing and mobile web site reporting solutions, today announced the beta launch of Mobilytics™ (http://www.mobilytics.net), the first completely free hosted mobile web site specific web analytics solution that generates revenue for mobile web site publishers.

Traditional web analytics collect detailed visitor information using browser technologies that are not available on most mobile phones. Because of this, mobile web site statistics are inaccurate and unreliable in performing visitor analysis. Detailed analytical information that is easily available for Internet web sites is simply not possible on the mobile web.

Mobilytics has been built from the ground up as a mobile only analytics solution. The Mobilytics technology can identify unique mobile users, and track their visits through a site. In addition to providing correct statistics and metrics, Mobilytics provides detailed information and analytics based on mobile phone manufacturers, models and specific handset capabilities.

“If a mobile site owner wants to know what percentage of their visitors support streaming video, Mobilytics can tell them,” says Greg Harris, CEO of Mobile Visions, Inc. “More importantly, Mobilytics can show you exactly where your advertising dollar is going. Are you paying for ads that are clicked on by search engine crawlers? Are they desktop pc users? Mobilytics can answer all this and more.”

Web site owners, who choose to use the free version of Mobilytics, can do so by joining the “Mobilytics Ad Network“. By simply placing the Mobilytics code on their web site, a small MMA compliant text ad is shown to their visitors. In addition to getting a full suite of analytic tracking tools, owners are given a share of all ad revenue generated by their site.

“This is the perfect combination,” continues Harris, “Web site publishers earn the same share of revenue they get from the existing mobile ad networks, while at the same time optimizing their sites and increasing traffic from accurate mobile specific analytics.”

For mobile sites that don’t show ads, Mobilytics is available for a low fee starting at $29.99 per month.

The Mobilytics Campaign Tracker allows advertisers to track their mobile ad campaigns, goals, revenue and return on investment. Publishers can get an accurate view across advertising networks, and compare ROI and other metrics.

Mobilytics is simple to install on any mobile site and requires no software or dedicated servers. The site owner simply places a small snippet of code on their site and reports immediately begin to be generated.

More information about Mobilytics can be found at http://www.mobilytics.net.

About Mobile Visions, Inc:

Mobile Visions, Inc., based in Princeton, NJ, provides SMS text messaging solutions, and mobile web solutions. Founded in 2006, Mobile Visions’ mission is to make it easier for the small-to-medium business to take advantage of new mobile technologies. For information on other products and service, visit http://www.movisions.com.

For additional information, Contact: Greg Harris, CEO, Mobile Visions Inc., 866-925-4114

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One thing I have noticed since getting more involved with the mobile web is that the mobile web produces a lot of page views. For companies like AdMob to be serving billions of ads, there have to be billions of page views to server them on.

A well designed mobile web site should have shorter, faster loading pages to accommodate the screen real estate and slow network speeds. This hopefully leads to more page views per visit, and ultimately more ads being delivered.

Currently, we are conducting an on-line survey, and sending beta invites to people who take it. One of the questions asks the number of page views per month, and the number of visitors per month. I have been extremely surprised by the high number of pageviews per site. We’re talking about double digit averages, with some sites as high as 40 page views per visitor.

This definitely leads to a lot of advertising inventory, and a lot of information to be tracked. As our beta progresses, we are making changes to our infrastructure to accommodate what we hope will be the hundreds of millions of page views per month coming through our servers.

For those techies out there, that’s where Amazon.com’s Elastic Computing Cloud becomes invaluable.