Mobislim Webmasters Blog

Mobile advertising with ZestADZ

maria at bango — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:00:47 +0000

This blog post is part of a series in which we’ll be reviewing self-service mobile advertising networks, to give you an insight on how they work, what they offer and to save you some time when setting up your campaigns. We’ll be analyzing the results using Bango Analytics.

ZestADZ in a nutshell:

Can I set up my campaign online? Yes

How long does it take to set up? Less than 2 minutes.

Payment options: Wire transfer or PayPal

Minimum payment: $100

Bidding options: CPC and CPM

Targeting:

You can target By Countries and Carriers, Device manufacturers and devices and also Required capabilities. This option lets you choose platforms (J2ME MIDP 1.0, J2ME MIDP 2.0, Symbian, Windows, RIM, OSX and Linux) and properties (MP3, Video and Midi)

You can also bid by Channel and the minimum bid is $ 0.05. The channels are: Entertainment, Downloads, Sports, News and Information, Communities, Portals, Ringtones, Videos, Photos, Careers, Technology, Education, Business, Health, Games, Finance, Weather, TV and Others.

Tricky bit: The URL I used to track the campaign was too long. I had to put a shorter URL and send them an email so they could amend the URL for me to include the tracking parameters. They did that immediately, so do not hesitate to contact them if you have the same problem!

Annoying bit: If you decide to do a wire transfer, and you are a non US resident, you need to send the money to a different account from the one shown on their website. Get in contact with them because otherwise you’ll be wasting time. It took me nearly a month to get the money into my advertiser account.

Great stuff: They have good APIs for publishers to get more information about the performance of the ads. Unfortunately they don’t have any for advertisers, so it is highly recommended to use an alternative analytics tool.

Analytics provided:

Impressions, Clicks, CTR and average CPC.

What I chose:

I chose US, UK, Spain and South Africa to check what kind of inventory they have in these countries and All devices and all capabilities. For channels I chose entertainment, downloads, sports, news and Information, communities, portals, videos, photos and health and my bid was $0.33 with a total budget of $100.

My observations:

To check the campaign results I used Bango Analytics. For country targeting I got 91% US traffic, 5% Spanish traffic, 1.5% UK traffic and 0.08% South African traffic. Almost 2% of traffic came from countries that I hadn’t targeted like India, China or Tanzania.

Even though I targeted my campaign by channel and devices, I didn’t get results on ZestADZ based on these choices. Using Bango Analytics I could filter the results by devices and it showed me that 83 % of my unique visitors where using an iPhone or an iTouch. From the rest of devices there was a high percentage of smartphones. I even saw a couple of iPads!

I exported a traffic report on Bango Analytics to check the referrals to get an idea of where the ads where being displayed. But when it came to the iPhone traffic, all I could see was the Mobclix platform, which doesn’t give me any info of where the ads have been displayed. For the rest of devices I saw a good variety of mobile sites.

Data to look at to fine tune this campaign:

Analysing conversion rates

The call to action for this campaign was to download a free application, a BMI calculator. Using Bango Analytics I was able to check the conversions, by tracking how many visitors clicked on the download button. The conversion rate for this campaign was 16%, which is very good!

But after seeing the conversation rate, which in this case was very high, surely it’d be good to get more detailed data. So I used the filters in Bango Analytics and I was able to see the

Bango Analytics Unique Visitor by Hour

performance across different days, here’s what I found:

I filtered by Unique Visitors and saw that Friday performed much better than Saturday, Sunday and Monday, with more than 3000 unique visitors.

I was curious to see what caused the spike in traffic on Friday so I then filtered visitors by time of the day, and was able to see that the campaign ran for 12 hours on Friday and 3 and a half hours on Saturday and Sunday. It would be interesting to see if by running the campaign for the same amount of active hours each day, we would get the same amount of traffic

18% of US traffic converted, 13.7% for and only 5% of the traffic in Spain. Maybe it is worth to put our budget on US traffic when using this ad network; even though the UK converted well the amount of traffic coming from this country wasn’t so high.

Regarding devices, Apple iPhone and Apple iTouch were by far the devices that downloaded the app the most. Even though the app we were advertising was not a native iPhone app, these users seemed more prone to click the download button. Interesting!

Would you like to see the result of this campaign on our demo account? Just follow these easy steps:

Go to the Bango Analytics platform by visiting the bango demo
Go to “Analytics reports” and change the date range to start from 4th June 2010 and end date 7th of June
Click on “Campaign and goals” on the left hand side and then click “Campaign parameters”
Filter the report by clicking on “Create a new filter” at the top of the report and drag the “Campaign parameter” tab across. By selecting the relevant “Source” you will be able to see the results and also compare all the other mobile advertising campaigns we ran at the same time. For the ZestADZ campaign choose Zestadz_BMI
To see how many people clicked on the download button, simply edit the filter you have previously set up and drag the “Page title” tab across. Select BMI Calculator DOWNLOADS and apply the filter.

We invite you to visit our demo account and check other filters and play with the different reports. If you like what you see and you would like to try Bango Analytics, sign up now for a free trial.

Device analysis and call to actions

maria at bango — Fri, 21 May 2010 11:37:37 +0000

The arrival of the iPad to the market has brought new marketing opportunities and new discussions around whether it should be consider a mobile device or not. Whichever way we go, we should really consider the proliferation of different devices such as Netbooks, Kindles, iPads and alike. They are becoming more popular and they are connected to the internet either via WiFi or 3G. Bear in mind that even though these devices are portable and internet connected, they are not communication devices.

But whether they are mobile or communication devices is not the only factor to consider when planning your marketing strategy. Most importantly, you should be considering if these devices are in fact relevant to your business, think about how you are going to adapt you messages and call to actions to these devices. And you can only do do this by analyzing the traffic to your site.

Scottevest's big pocket for big gadgets

Click-to-call won’t work
Voucher redemption won’t be ideal, they are portable devices but they won’t fit in the pocket of your jeans!
Video ads will become the holy grail, so think how you can make them different and how to get your users involved in the video experience.

My colleague Andy Bovingdon has published a very interesting blog post The iPad…so is it mobile? in which he analyzes whether we should consider this device as a mobile device, and gives us some figures on the size of the Netbooks market.

Another recommended reading by the same author but from a more strategic point of view can be found on mSearchGrove blog Should iPad Be High On Your Radar? Or Low On The List?

I hope you enjoy these readings and get a better understanding of how crucial is to accurately identify what devices are important for your product or service proposition, and how to adapt your strategy.

Mobile search advertising with Bing

maria at bango — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 11:04:57 +0000

This is the first of a series of post in which we’ll review mobile advertising and search networks to give you a heads up on what you are going to find when you decide to run a mobile advertising or mobile search marketing campaign. We’ll review the same points in all of them, so you can quickly get an overview on how much effort and money you have to put in.

Can I set up my campaign online? Yes

How long does it take to set up? Less than 10 minutes.

Payment options: Credit and debit cards, but not those with chip and pin security

Minimum payment: There is no minimum; it will depend on how your campaign performs

Bidding options: CPC, with either a monthly budget or a daily budget so you can adjust for heavier traffic during a promotion.

Targeting:

Day of Week
Hours of Day
Demographic : gender and age

Tricky bit: If you set up your account as English-UK or give a UK address, mobile won´t show up as an option. You need to set the account as English-United States. To be able to do a mobile campaign you need to have a PC campaign set up (even if it is just a draft) and after that you will be able to create a mobile ad for that campaign or ad group. This process is not very intuitive if you just want to create a mobile ad.

Annoying bit: When they let you know that some of your keywords have been disapproved they don´t say which ones or from which campaign, which means you have to check all your campaigns manually.

Great stuff: You can track conversions rates as long as the end user mobile phone can store cookies.

Analytics provided:

Classic ad network analytics with the exception of conversions as they were set up.
Impressions, Clicks, CTR, Average CTR, Spend, Average position. They offer an extensive list of reports that you can run, but they all offer the same info as I stated before, whether it’s for an ad, ad group, campaign or account level.
The time of the day goes in blocks of 4 to 5 hours

Would you like to see the result of this campaign on our demo account? Just follow these easy steps:

Go to the Bango Analytics platform by visiting the bango demo
Go to “Analytics reports” and change the date range to start from 24th March 2010
Click on “Campaign and goals” on the left hand side and then click “Campaign parameters”
Filter the report by clicking on “Create a new filter” at the top of the report and drag the “Campaign parameter” tab across. By selecting the relevant “Source” you will be able to see the results and also compare all the other mobile advertising campaigns we ran at the same time. For the Bing campaign choose Bing_Adcenter_BMI and if you want to compare results with the other campaigns we ran choose one or more of the following Decktrade_BMI, Google_Adwords_BMI and Mojiva_BMI and apply filter (will add a screenshot)
On the main results table, open the drop down menu and filter by source so you can see the results by ad network.

How to measure conversion rates:

The call to action for this campaign was to download a free application, a BMI calculator. You can check the conversions as Bango Analytics can track how many visitors clicked on the download button. These clicks can be linked to the campaign parameter and, as a result, you can see in just a couple of clicks how well your mobile ads performed:

Simply edit the filter you have previously set up and drag the “Page title” tab across. Select BMI Calculator DOWNLOADS and apply the filter. You can see how many people downloaded the application and how successful each of the ad networks were. From this figure you can also calculate your conversion rates.
If you export this report, you can actually see the unique user id of each of the users that downloaded the application. This is very good as you can reward these users if they come back again or offer them different content based on their previous behaviour.

Feel free to check other filters and play with the different reports. If you like what you see and you would like to try Bango Analytics, sign up now for a free trial.

Measure mobile campaign conversions in a couple of clicks

Beccy Asplin — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:49:30 +0000

At the end of January I was interested to see that Bango reported 83% of brands don’t use mobile specific analytics tools, leading to inaccurate data on campaign performance. But even more surprising, 27% of brands don’t measure at all! I know it would make life easier if you didn’t have to report on the performance of your mobile marketing campaigns, but surely real marketers would like to know?

Not wanting to know conversion rates or what to do to improve them seems a bit crazy to me?! The good news is it’s actually quite easy to accurately measure your mobile campaign conversions and best of all you can see the results a in couple of clicks.

So, how do you do it? The easiest and most accurate way I’ve found is to use Bango Analytics. If you already have a Bango Analytics account, log in (or sign up for a trial account) and follow these easy steps:

1. Pass the relevant campaign parameters on your destination URL when setting up your mobile marketing campaigns.

2. Add page tracking code to the relevant pages you want to track within your mobile site.

3. Once the campaign is running, go to your Bango Analytics account and choose the Campaign parameter report and filter by the relevant Campaign parameters and Page title where the conversion happens. Voila! You can now see the number of conversions attributed to your campaigns.

Let’s go through a real example:

I set up a mobile campaign with the goal of getting visitors opted-in to receive my SMS updates and wanted to measure the number of conversions from each campaign.

To start with I ran two different mobile advertising campaigns, both pointing to the same landing page. When I set up the mobile ads I passed the relevant campaign parameters so I could identify which ad my visitors came from (Mobile Ad 1 or Mobile Ad 2).

To measure the number of conversions I had to find out how many unique visitors submitted their phone number and therefore landed on the Thank you! page (only visitors who opted-in would reach this page). To capture this information I put a line of page tracking code on the Thank you! page.

To view the results I went to the Campaign parameter report in my Bango Analytics account and filtered by Campaign parameters “Mobile Ad 1” and “Mobile Ad 2” and Page title “Thank you page” and that was it! I could see in a couple of clicks the number of conversions from each mobile ad campaign in real-time!

I could even calculate the conversion rates as Bango Analytics had recorded the total number of unique visitors from each ad campaign.

Lost in the mobile maze, free whitepaper

maria at bango — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:44:26 +0000

If you feel like you’re living in an episode of Star Trek when people in the industry talks about transcoders, latency, cookies, gateways, tracking codes, markup languages and postbacks, today is your lucky day!

Today, my colleagues at Bango have published a new white paper entitled “Lost in the mobile maze”, explaining Why mobile complexity continues to challenge the biggest and best in the industry.

This white paper sets out the challenges that need to be understood to succeed in developing mobile solutions and explains all the bits that need to be considered when taking your brand to mobile.

Now you´ll be able to understand the conversations and make better decisions about your mobile strategy. Download your free copy today and “geek up”!

Google mobile analytics needs a Bango makeover

maria at bango — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:52:46 +0000

This week Google finally got round to releasing some tracking code for mobile (read about it here). It uses familiar server and image techniques like many of the other analytics solutions. Naturally I was keen to test it out so I grabbed their server code and integrated it with Mobislim. So far so good, or was it…

Testing it on my first two handsets revealed a broken Mobislim site…. Arrgh, the standard simple bit of tracking code from Google does not work.

Error on mobislim.com after adding Google mobile analytics code

My iPhone immediately threw up an error as shown in the image on the right. I assume Google expect me to detect iPhones and send separate JavaScript tracking code, but that is too much like hard work. So instead I tested the site on a mass market Nokia N95… another error, what phones did they use to test this?

So to test things correctly and in the spirit of helping build the mobile market my friends at Bango fixed the Google tracking code. So Google if you are reading this, your code is broken and here is a fix: http://mobislim.com/googleanalyticsformobile-with-jsp-fix.zip, I hope that helps.

Now that we are up and recording I will let you know the outcome in due course. Frustratingly, unlike Bango’s real-time reports I need to wait some time to get my results with the new Google mobile analytics code.

Watch this space, more information soon…

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Accurate info on your Google Mobile AdWords campaigns

maria at bango — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:38:52 +0000

Last week, I started running a Google AdWords campaign using the Bango parameters for mobile campaign tracking. I set up two different text ads, each one with a different keyword group so I could analyse which ad was being served more times and therefore which keywords are more effective. Here are the two different urls I used (note different values for the parameters). I also targeted Google content network with these ads.

http://mobislim.com/bgo_campaign=fun_slimming_tips&bgo_source=google&bgo_medium=adwords&bgo_content=short_ad&bgo_term=adgroup_mobislim&bgo_owner=sanchez

and

http://mobislim.com/?bgo_campaign=get_slim_today&bgo_source=google&bgo_medium=adwords&bgo_content=long_ad&bgo_term=adgroup_slimming&bgo_owner=maria

My ultimate goal was to understand the behaviour of the users that come to my site via specific keywords. While AdWords reports are quite thorough on keyword performance they don’t show me the behaviour of the individual users. With Bango, every visitor gets a unique user ID that shows me exactly this; the behaviour of every single user when they arrive to my site. The parameters I specified are linked to this unique user ID and are passed on as the user navigates my site. Here is an example:

The visitor with the User ID 470841589 got to the site homepage at 6:02 via Google Mobile with the keyword “lose+weight”. This user comes from the United States, via Sprint and is using a LG LX265 handset. From the home page we can see that he or she visited different pages of our site and we can actually see the exact time he spent on each page.

The search term “lose+weight” triggered our “fun slimming tips” ad, (named in the spreadsheet as this “short_ad”), which is using the specific keyword group “adword_mobislim” and whose campaign owner is “sanchez”.

If the ad had been placed in any of the content network sites, the referrer information would also have been recorded.

Being able to see this granularity of how our visitors behave on our site gives us invaluable information about their interest, the trends that they follow and how to optimize the site using keywords, geo-information, time of the day and handsets. The Bango campaign parameters can be used to drill down to specific keywords, as we can define a different url for different keyword groups. You can use these parameters to attribute monetary value or to measure the performance of different landing pages. You have 6 different variables that you can use whichever way you like!

Find out more about why Bango can accurately identify users or learn more on how to best use the Bango campaign parameters.

If you would like to check the performance of this campaign by yourself, just follow these easy steps:

Bango analytics demo account

Change the dates to 24th to the 29th of September

Export a traffic report

New white paper by Bango “Increase your campaign ROI with mobile analytics” ready to download

maria at bango — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:00:00 +0000

Bango has released a new white paper with the title “Increase your campaign ROI with mobile analytics” as part of a series of educational white papers to help people make the most of the mobile ecosystem. You can download the white paper for free at www.bango.com/campaignanalyticswp
Reading this white paper you will learn:

The key mobile advertising metrics
How to measure conversions on mobile
Mobile complexities affecting accuracy and ROI
The importance of accuracy as a foundation for success
Effective targeting and quick reactions to increase ROI

It also provides you with good resources and hints and tips to help you develop your mobile advertising strategy. Keep this white paper close when looking for mobile advertising networks, mobile search engines and effective tools to measure your campaigns.

Enjoy!

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Would you like a piece of the BlackBerry pie?

maria at bango — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:22:03 +0000

We have been talking lately about the increase of smartphones accessing the internet via Wifi connections, how iPhone is gaining positions on our device ranking and today Bango published a free whitepaper Increasing your slice of the BlackBerry pie, to help us understand and overcome the challenges of how can we accurately identify BlackBerry users for tracking, CRM and marketing campaign purposes; and also how is it possible to enable these customers to make transactional payments on their mobile phone bill, just like any other phone.

Smartphones have become the standard handset of choice in the mobile phone market – even during global recession the growth in smartphone sales continues to soar. Gartner reported a global smartphone sales growth of 27% year-on-year in Q2 2009 compared to a 6% drop in cell phone sales during the same period. And the numbers in the USA were even more dramatic during the second quarter. The research firm NPD Group reported US smartphone sales grew by 47% and accounted for 28% of all handset sales.

Get your copy of the white paper and find out:

•Why BlackBerry has become a popular consumer device

• How BlackBerry users consume data services

• The challenge of capturing identity and delivering payment to Blackberry users

• Optimizing your mobile services to overcome these challenges

Mobile Analytics shows iPhone gaining positions on device ranking

maria at bango — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 11:45:13 +0000

With all the hype around the iPhone, we couldn’t help but wonder how many iPhones are accessing our mobile site. So we checked our Bango analytics package and had a look to the most popular devices accessing our mobile site since February. The data reveals the following:

Month	iPhone position
February	5th
March	7th
April	5th
May	4th
June	4th
July	26th *
August (so far)	2nd

*we run a mobile campaign in June targeting everything but iPhones.

More and more mobile advertising networks have now specific targeting options aiming at iPhones. There are specific publisher groups so ads can be displayed on iPhone apps.

Taking all of this into consideration we have decided to create our own iMobislim. Yes, you read it right. Our own iPhone specific site is on its way. Our wap master , Tom Thurston from Mobile Impossible is developing the site and this is what he has to say:

Bango analytics told us that iphone users were spending less time on pages, viewing less pages and were becoming an increasingly large proportion of our users. Tests found that due to O2 image transcoding, our iPhone users were seeing poor page presentation. So we decided to give our iPhone users cool ajax based slidey screens, some glossy iPhone icons, and we used png format instead of gifs and jpeg, which escape the dreaded transcoder. The site looks a lot cooler on iPhones now, almost like a native app – we’re hoping that our next analytics run will show an improvement in browsing stats for our iPhone users.
We also found out that even iPhones are going up in popularity the percentage of traffic that represent is not so high in absolute values. So don’t stop advertising to the rest of the handsets, because you will have not such a big market to engage with. Just fine tune your targeting capabilities and the creatives when advertising to iPhones. You can find out all the information about handsets by accessing our live Bango Analytics package and clicking on devices. To get more in depth data, filter the reports.

Millenial Media’s July SMART shows this same trend on their device highlights:

iPhone continued to dominate the top devices category with a 12.21% share, a 3.62% increase over June.
iPhone/iPod Touch impressions increased 29% across the network in July.
Apple continued to close the gap; however, Samsung remained the top device manufacturer in July.
Two new mobile devices entered the top 20 in July –the LG enV2 and the Samsung SCH-U410.

You want to have a preview of iMobislim? Check this out! Browse the whole site on http://iphone.mobislim.com/