Opinion: Ray Anderson, CEO, Bango

Analytics on mobile needs a different approach 

A decade ago, forward thinking people spent ‘optimistically’ on web advertising. Measurement came later.   

But if you bought an ad on an Internet page in 1996/97 you could be pretty sure that the viewer was affluent – as they would have a PC, a modem, an ISP and would have bought a TCP/IP stack and downloaded a web browser. You could also bet that they were probably living in the USA, UK, Germany or a short list of other countries that could understood your brand.

With mobile it’s the reverse. To start with, 90 per cent of mobile browsing is done by the least expensive 90 per cent of handsets. There are relatively few users of expensive handsets and they don't browse much; that’s according to analysis of handset types over the last year at Bango.   

Also, a phone is cheap and the likely-hood is that the regular browser is more typically ‘shop girl’ or ‘white van man’ rather than ‘executive’ or ‘free spending youth’.  Furthermore, a very high proportion of traffic comes from countries like India, China, Indonesia, Kenya and South Africa; places where most western brands - with the possible exception of Coca Cola or Manchester United - have little relevance.

Therefore, if you are a mobile advertiser or marketer you need to be more savvy and measure results and make sure that the sources of traffic you buy from can target by operator, country and device.   

Google has a long way to go to provide a useful mobile analytics solution, and perhaps at the moment they are not motivated to do so as they are automatically placing web ads on mobile devices. 

But it’s a widely held view that the lack of independent mobile analytics is holding back mobile marketing initiatives. That’s why we think Bango Analytics is an important step forward by delivering mobile focused web stats essential to understanding how people interact with mobile websites and which marketing campaigns are most effective. This helps mobile site owners engage with their audience more effectively by providing information about who their visitors are, where they come from and what they do.

If Gartner’s (IT) forecast of $11 billion in global revenue from mobile advertising by 2011 is to materialise, marketers will need to measure the effectiveness of their marketing dollars in mobile.

www.bango.com