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®ister=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.
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