Well according to Dennis at Wap Review, and a Bango newsletter I got today, Verizon has installed the Novarra Transcoder on their network.

The largest US mobile carrier, Verizon Wireless has started funneling traffic between Verizon feature phones and the  web through a transcoder from Novarra.  Verizon calls the service “Optimized View” and has added promotional information and a FAQ to their customer website  There is also a page on the carrier’s developer site which has links to a opt-out form and to a  PDF document detailing the rules that the transcoder uses to determine which sites to transcode.

Essentially what this means for mobile analytics is that you are not getting the correct phone information. Rather than seeing “SonyEricsson K770” in your reports, you might see “Novarra-Vision/7.3”.

While this may be a problem for some mobile analytics vendors (see http://bangoserviceblog.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/verizon-transcodes-mobile-websites/), it is not an issue for us.

We built Mobilytics knowing that transcoders and other exceptions exist. As long as the vendor adheres to some basic guidelines (which almost all do), we are able to still report the correct information. We simply add some info to our exception engine, and all is well.

A similar issue exists for Blackberry Phones, the Google Transcoder, the Opera Mini browser, and other various sites and transcoders. This is why Mobile is different. Regular web analytics can’t account for these exceptions and provide incorrect information.

I want to thank Bango for pointing out this issue so we could update our exceptions engine. Nothing needs to be done by the Mobilytics customer for continued accurate reporting. While you will be seeing a lot of “Mozilla’s” and “Novarra’s” at Bango, expect to see less of them here in the coming days.

You can read up on the controversal issue of transcoding at some of the following links. Since Verizon is giving you the option of getting white listed, you should do that to ensure the user is seeing your site correctly. It’s not needed for Mobilytics.

http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=536

http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/manifesto/

http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=516

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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.

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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…

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