Google mobile analytics needs a Bango makeover

28 10 2009

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.

Screen shot showing my broken site after adding Google mobile analytics code to mobislim

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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Mobile Analytics shows iPhone gaining positions on device ranking

28 08 2009

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/

iMobislim homepage iMobislim radish diet iMobislim registration

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How much should I pay for mobile advertising?

27 05 2009

The answer should be: as much or as little as you want. But the reality is completely different.
I have been trying for quite a while to find mobile advertising networks, or mobile social networking sites to run one of my small campaigns targeting South Africa. By small I mean $100. I know is not much money, but I would have thought that if I had money to spend, mobile advertising companies, social networks and mobile search engines would be happy to take my money and let me try out their services.  But the minimum expenditure by campaign in some of them is so high that only the big fish can swim in those waters.

Let’s be honest, everybody says that is still early days for mobile advertising…well, no kidding! There are only a number of brands that can afford and are willing to test out a new medium like mobile for the reasonable price of $10,000. I am no fool, I know that big money comes from big companies, money calls money. But what happens to the long tail of advertisers that don’t have the big bucks but still see potential in mobile advertising? In this case, you have very few options – Google, Admob, Decktrade, Mojiva or Buzzcity (that I know)…which are great ad networks, but maybe not the only ones I would like to target.

Let’s say that I’m interested in local search and I’m a local garage that wants to target people in my city only, my only choice is to go to Google as Yahoo! would cost me a minimum of $10,000(ekk).
Let’s say I want to promote my new song from my small independent band: Nokia wouldn’t let me for less than $5,000 and Itsmy – on a more reasonable range – would charge $500 (although I want to thank them again for letting me try their services with a $100 campaign). In this same range is another mobile search engine, Taptu.

So isn’t the Mobile advertising industry interested in the long tail? Thanks to mobile analytics solutions, such as Bango Analytics, we see traffic from all over the world accessing the mobile web. We see new markets using the mobile web more and more. Small businesses with small budgets have potential customers in those markets, and guess what – they all have mobile phones.
I wonder why advertising networks that have the online back end to manage mobile campaigns don’t open their networks to smaller advertisers. And those ones that haven’t got the online platform, what are they waiting for?


If you are a mobile ad network or a mobile search engine, and have a flexible pricing model, please send us your website so we can tick you as friendly small advertiser provider.  We should create a badge for these kind of companies!!!

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New! Bango mobile analytics v4 is here! Get a 30 day FREE trial on bango.com/analytics

22 04 2009

Bango has announced today the launch of Bango Analytics v4, and this is how I see the new granularity and depth of data can help all mobile marketers:

  • Now ALL visitors get a unique user ID. This gives an accurate total for unique visitors and let you drill down to see more information about each visitor, like when the first time you saw them was, or how many times have they been to your site. Why is this useful? Well, thanks to this you can check if a landing page is successful, if your navigation works well, if your message is compelling so people keep coming back to your site or if it sucks so bad, that people only comes once and leave for ever… useful, don’t you think?
  • You can now track unique visitors whether a mobile user connects via operator gateway, WiFi or home broadband – even if users change their connection, Bango still retains the ability to track them. Now everyone who interacts with a mobile website or mobile campaign has a privacy-protected, unique user ID, no matter what type of network connection they use.  So there are no mistakes in counting where your visitors come from, and how many of them you are getting, as Bango can see if the same visitor has come one time to your site via WiFi, or via WAP.
  • New advanced filtering and sorting enables precise segmentation of mobile data, so it’s quick to get to the results needed on a case by case basis.  Select to filter any report by page, country, operator, device, time or date.  This is just heaven! I can see if my smart phone visitors are the ones really buying or downloading my content, or if they are just browsing because they have unlimited browsing plans. This feature really tells me how my users interact with my site so I can go back and talk to them in their terms. It is just perfect.
  • Unlike other analytics solutions, Bango Analytics works from your original “raw” data and the new data warehouse delivers even better performance and scalability, allowing Bango to record, enrich and report more information about your visitors. This means, among many things, that your data is always available in its fullest capacity and is enriched anytime enhancements take place.

  • Bango Analytics lets you see metrics by the hour so you can understand how a mobile marketing campaign is performing in real time and make any necessary adjustments to ensure campaign success.  Thanks God somebody gets this, why would I want to look at my campaign results once the damage has been done? If something isn’t working, do you want to let it drag around until your budget is gone and your reputation ruined? I didn’t think so…another way to look at it is, imagine your campaign is targeting a particular group but looking at the results of the campaign there is a better response from a completely different public. If you can see this as it happens, wouldn’t you be amazed at how a few tweaks can make your campaign even more successful? Think how you use Google Adwords and how important this is…

  • Bango’s device reporting now lets you view your visitor’s devices by manufacturer, model and version.  Target your site or application to the most popular. Just reminding you not to sell ice to the Eskimos  ;-)

  • Bango Analytics records all the parameters passed on the URL.  Many marketing tools pass important information within the URL. By recording all this information, it’s all available to you for analysis.  Aha! Let’s check where our ads are really being displayed, in case you ever had any doubts…

  • Bango Analytics delivers the top 3 WAA metrics – page views, unique visitors and visits. It couldn’t be any other way.

Watch this space to see how we use all this new functionality in real mobile marketing campaigns or have a look by yourself on our analytics center where you can see real traffic and campaigns taken place.

We have a case study coming up on South African traffic and we are getting Mobislim optimize for mobile SEO, so there is quite a lot coming up!

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Weight Watchers slimmed down their potential market to just 9%, Bango mobile analytics reports

25 11 2008

weightwatchers_blackberry3I have been looking for some nice content that I could publish in Mobislim to make my  upcoming mobile marketing campaigns more interesting, and I stumbled upon the weightwatchers’ mobile site.  This is for weight watchers subscribers, which happens to work only on Blackberries, Windows Mobiles and iPhones. You need a login and password, so I couldn’t see what was behind that first login screen.

A mobile site or mobile application that only works for these 3 types of mobile devices makes me put my mobile analytics hat and check what percentage of traffic is actually coming from these handsets. So I went to my Bango mobile analytics centre and exported a traffic report of the last three months of activity in Mobislim. I think this is an appropriate comparison as the Weight Watchers visitors are likely to be similar to the Mobislim visitors as they’d have the same interests in common.

From 18,526 page views 4,05% came from a Blackberry device, 3,54% from a Windows Mobile and 1,48% from an iPhone. That’s 9% in total.

I imagine that there is a reason why weight watchers chose only these 3 handsets and decided to leave aside a 91% of potential users. I wonder whether it’s worth while for them to do it this way…

On the other hand, if you are not a weight watcher customer you don’t have access to the site. I typed weight watcher into Google on my mobile (which is normal Nokia by  the way) and I got to http://weitchwatchers.co.uk, the same site that visitors get to from a PC but on my mobile. Even though it works quite well, they are not really adapting the content for mobile users. I wonder if they track how many people goes to the PC site from their mobiles and if they have any more plans for mobile and for more types of handsets too!

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“Mobile advertising for newbies” campaign results in Admob Analytics

22 10 2008

Let’s have a look to the result obtained in the 3 campaigns that we ran with AdMob analytics for the white paper. To be clear, these results cannot possibly be the same as the Bango mobile analytics results as I used Admob query string in the destination URL, which means that the users from this campaigns are different than the users that clicked on the campaigns ran with Bango’s tracking links.

Decktrade Google Mo’jiva

Visits 323

Average time spent 13 sec.

Bounce rate 96%

Visits 21

Average time spent 17 sec.

Bounce rate 90.48%

Visits 127

Average time spent 3 sec

Bounce rate 98.43%

Let’s dig down in Decktrade:

The number of visits doesn’t vary that much between the 3 days of campaign, 121 visits on Wednesday, 97 on Thursday and 107 on Friday. Unique visitors are not identified in this campaign, and the number of page views is slightly higher than the number of visits, as you can see in the graphic.

The figure that worries me is the Bounce Rate, as it is very high every day. I haven’t managed to understand how this bounce rate is calculated, so I really would like someone from Admob to explain. Basically with this campaign, between 94% and 98% of users left the site straight away, which is not good news for mobislim : ( . AdMob help says it is: Single page view visits divided by the total number of visits. I need help on this one!

Let’s see now the engagement information:

312 visits of the campaign stayed on the landing page between 0-30 seconds, 3 between 31-60 seconds, 5

Lenght of visit in Admob analytics

Lenght of visit in Admob analytics

between 61-180, between 181-600 seconds and someone forgot to leave and stayed more than 600 seconds!

The depth of the visit (number of pages viewed) was mostly down to 1 page view, with 11 visits going around the site to find out more, as you can see in the graphic.

The loyalty (number of visits per user) tells me that only 2 users came more than once to the site and the visit interval (number of days since last visit) tells me that 324 visits are new.

Let’s have a look at the geo stats:

249 visits come from the US, 4 from the UK, both my target countries, and 70 visits came from a variety of countries that I wasn’t targeting. This means that 22% of my traffic didn’t come from my target countries.

Regarding operators, my most popular one was WIFI in United States with 76 visits, which means either a PC or a mobile phone getting to mobislim.wap.com through a WIFI connection in the US. I have 46 visits for unknown operators but they do say they are mobile, and another 46 from AOL. The list continues with different operators from different countries.

My top handset manufacturers were Nokia with 98 visits, Microsoft PC with 66, and Generic Windows Mobile with 45, followed by Motorola 24 and SonyEricsson 18.
What have I learnt from this results:

1.    The level of engagement is not very high but on the other hand the landing page had a clear call to action that was to download the chart, and you only need 4 seconds to read the message on the page…so maybe they just went straight away to download the chart and left the site afterwards looking for more content. We’ll try to measure conversion rates in future occasions.
2.    Targeting countries doesn’t seem to have such a great effect as 22% of my traffic came from countries I didn’t target.
3.    PC traffic is a big percentage of my traffic, I’m seriously starting to consider to expand Mobislim in to the PC world : )
4.    Generic windows mobile are 3rd in the rank, which means smartphone, I will consider this when planning my next campaign.

Let’s have a look now to Google:

The number of visits is higher on the Thursday (10) and Friday (7) than on Wednesday (4), with slightly higher number of page views on the Friday. Unique visitors are not shown for this campaign.

The level of engagement is showing me that 19 of the 21 stayed on the page between 0 and 60 seconds. In this campaign the first time interval is of 1 minute while in the Decktrade campaign was 30 seconds, I imagine the reason for this is the smaller number of visitors. The depth of visit says that 19 viewed 1-2 pages, 1 visited between 3 and 5 and 1 more than 6. All of the visits were new visits.

Let’s have a look at the geo stats. My 21 visits come from the US…hmmm, nobody looking for my keywords

Top operators from Google campaign in Admob analytics

Top operators from Google campaign in Admob analytics

in the UK? The 3 top operators are AT&T, Cricket Wireless and Sprint, and the top devices are, if I look to the manufacturer RIM, Palm and Motorola, looking the rest on the list and the models, mostly are smartphones.

My take in this Google campaign:

1.    Smartphones seem to be the kind of handsets that search the mobile internet the most.
2.    UK users don’t seem to be looking for burning calories keyword related terms on the mobile web

And to finish this post let’s have a look at Mo’jiva. The number of visits was 127 with more visits on the Thursday and the Friday. From an engagement point of

Visits recorded from the Mo'jiva campaign

Visits recorded from Mo'jiva in Admob anlaytics

view, this campaign is pretty similar to the other ones except for the average time spent that was 3 sec. This a bit too low from my point of view. Let’s see the geo stats – my top 3 countries were India (82), US (19) and Nigeria (10). My top 3 operators are Airtel Cellular India, Desktop in India and MTN Nigeria. My top 3 device manufacturers were Nokia (47) Microsoft PC (21) and Unknown (18).

What I have learnt from this campaign:

1.    I think that something must be not working well as the average time spent –  3 seconds – is quite low.
2.    2 of my top 3 countries were not on my target list, and only 19 visits came from one of my target countries. This means that only a 15% of the traffic was relevant to my campaign.
3.    PC is still a winner form Mobislim! : )

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How I use mobile analytics to measure mobile advertising II Part

3 10 2008

I said last week in my post ”How I use mobile analytics to measure mobile advertising” that I would report back the results of the campaign I run on Decktrade. As the Decktrade campaign didn’t start running at the same time as the Google and Mojiva campaigns, I decided to keep these two running, so I would obtain results based on the same dates.

For $5 daily budget, campaigns running from the 22nd to the 26th of September and using
Bango mobile analytics to measure results,  the results are:

Decktrade

Google

Mojiva

293 page views

228 unique visitors

27 unique countries

46 unique operators

107 unique devices

117 page views

85 unique visitors

13 unique countries

27 unique operators

44 unique devices

75 page views

63 unique visitors

3 unique countries

11 unique operators

28 unique devices

Looking at the page views and unique visitor results, what I see is that Decktrade gives me a considerable higher number of repeat visitors, and a higher number of clicks on my ad. This makes me  think they have a much bigger network than Mojiva, which reports a quarter of those clicks for the same amount of money. Google’s results are more difficult to judge because they do depend on my selected keywords, and rather than general browsing on the mobile web, they reflect the amount of people actively searching for my selected keywords. Overall it’s great news for mobile marketers because it proves that people are searching on the mobile web.

Now, let’s have a look at the conversion rates: the objective of this campaign was to download a free chart. Let’s see what we got:

Bango mobile analytics goal comparison feature

Bango mobile analytics goal comparison feature

Overall I’m VERY happy to see an average conversion rate of 35.05%. Decktrade performed very well with a 38.57%, Mojiva 24% and Google 33.33%. Now, the real point of this is to check those conversions* against the money I spent on the campaigns. I have added those figures in pink. And who is my winning campaign on this occasion? That would be Google, because even though the conversion rate wasn’t the best of the 3 it turns out that I only paid $10 for those conversions, and $25 for the others.
Does this mean that Google is better than Decktrade or Mojiva? Absolutely not! The only thing that tells me is that when people initiate a conversation they are more proactive in engaging with your brand because your ad is relevant to the purpose of their search.

Relevancy = Success and better ROI.  When planning your next campaign think twice when choosing the categories you want to put your ad on and get a mobile analytics tool that gives you an X-ray of your visitors and your conversions.  This means you know how to talk to your potential customers the next time you get the chance to engage with them.

*I said last week that I didn’t have any conversions, and in fact I did, Bango analytics wasn’t synchronizing the info properly, but that is fixed now and I was able to go back and capture that data….and I’m so happy about it! 35% average conversion rate!!!

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“Mobile advertising for newbies” Mobislim protagonist of this white paper

24 09 2008

I’m very pleased to announce that Mobislim has been selected as the WAP site to test mobile ad campaigns and measure results. It’s all part of a path-breaking white paper called “Mobile advertising for newbies”, that was announced today at ad-tech in London.

 

"Mobile advertising for newbies" white paperPeggy Anne Salz, author of the white paper and chief analyst and publisher of www.msearchgroove.com, has chosen this site because its the only open space available to marketers for experimentation and a perfect Petri dish to test all our ideas and assumptions about mobile campaigns and analytics tools. It’s going to be an exciting exercise that doesn’t stop there. Peggy and I will continue to blog about our experiences at our sites and encourage your participation and feedback.

 

So I invite everyone to road test mobile advertising and to use Mobislim as a platform for this. The site is an ideal destination where anyone can learn how to run successful mobile advertising campaigns, without having to spend lots of money in advance or even developing a mobile site.

 

To find out more about this white paper and download you complimentary copy, please go to bango.com/whitepaper

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