Mobile SEO, search engines and directories for the mobile web

In our effort to get our  Mobislim mobile site ranking and SEO optimized, I found this blog post “The place to be: mobile search engines and portals where you should register your site” at mobithinking.com, which is just exactly what we needed for our mobile site mobislim.com.  Thank you mobithinking for sharing this with all of us! This is great information and I thought I would help to spread the word.

Not all the big operators and content sites uses Yahoo!, Google  and Microsoft as default search , so they advise you to register with white-label providers such as Medio or Jumptap. Here is a list of search engines where you should register your mobile site

• Find.mobi: search for your site on find.mobi.
• Yahoo oneSearch: search for your site on yahoo.mobi; and submit site here.
• Taptu: search for your site on taptu.mobi; and submit site here.
• Seek4Wap: search for your site on Seek4Wap; and submit site here.
• Microsoft Live: search for your site here: live.mobi; submit site here.
• Medio Systems: submit site here.
• Jumptap: submit site here.
• Google: search for your site on google.mobi; submit site map here.

For lots more mobile search providers, see wapSwap (also includes directories and portals) and the excellent WAPReview.mobi.

There are countless mobile directories and portals of varying quality and depth of content, as well as geographical and vertical focus (check which ones allow/disallow adult content for example). Most have links to submit a URL from either the home page or from a particular category. Some may request a link in return. There’s a good list of directories of mobile and PDA sites on WAPReview.mobi (including some non-English speaking ones).

Here is a handful of directories to get you started:

• Zerorubbish.mobi: to submit a site you need to sign up.
• wapSwap, visit the relevant category and click on link to submit site.
• WAP Review – mobile sites: wapreview.mobi, yeswap.mobi; submit site for review here.
• Oh! Mobile – mobile site: oh.dirlink.mobi; and submit site here.
• dir.mobi; follow guidelines to submit site here.

See this very handy list of both directories and search providers with many direct links to submit your site from UK mobile agency We Love Mobile (thanks to Simon Liss for this).

I guess Tom and his SEO squad will be quite busy these days sending our site to all these search engines and directories. I will report back on how this helped to our rankings.  We’ll use Bango Mobile  Analytics referrer information to check how much traffic the search engines and directories are sending us, and best of all which keywords people are using to get to our site.

If you have more search engines and directories that we should be mentioning please let me know so we can give something back to mobithinking.

Follow Mobislim updates on twitter  http://twitter.com/mobislim

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

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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iPhone: Not a top 20 handset for browsing and buying on the mobile web

If you are thinking in focusing your mobile advertising just on the iPhone, keep reading!
Just in case, this is not an April Fool’s joke 🙂

According to statistics released on Monday by Bango, when it comes to the most popular phones for browsing and buying content on the mobile web worldwide, the iPhone sits outside the top 20. The Bango Top 20 handset list, based on Bango’s February statistics, puts the Nokia 3110c on top, followed by the Samsung M800 in 2nd and the Nokia 6300 in 3rd. The iPhone appears at 24th on the list.
This data represents the activities of major brands and businesses as their consumers browse to mobile websites (measured by Bango Analytics) and buy mobile content and services (as measured by Bango Payment).
The stats come from the month of February when 1.1 million unique visitors browsed to mobile websites as monitored by Bango’s Analytics service (customers include the Financial Times and MTV) and bought mobile content and services using Bango’s Payment service (customers include Thumbplay, Buongiorno, Gameloft, EA Games).
This sample size is certainly considerably larger than trials carried out by comScore and others. With global penetration of the iPhone at 1% according to Gartner, brands need to look beyond the iPhone to reach the mass market.

Let’s have a look at our site mobislim.wap.com and check the footprint that iPhones left on our Bango Analytics center:
January 0,44% of the devices that access our mobile site where iPhones, from a total of 614 devices and 25,040 page views.
February saw a 1.32% of iPhones from 313 devices and 5,738 pageviews (you can tell we didn’t run any campaigns…)
And March shows another increase with 1,41% of iPhones from 331 devices and 6,303 page views.

Check this out by yourself in our analytics center!

Putting this into context, as you probably know the iPhone browses “normal” site content but it doesn’t handle Flash, and you can’t follow links that lead to the download of content or files.   It can also be a pretty painful experience for large, complex sites – compare m.ft.com with ft.com and you get the picture.

For that reason, many sites are producing specially adapted sites for the iPhone. Look at how much better iphone.facebook.com is than facebook.com – in fact even Apple has an iPhone specific version of parts of apple.com.  So, we are seeing more and more businesses detecting the mobile Safari on their PC website and pushing them to the iPhone adapted site.
Personally, I have an iPhone and like many of my friends I think it’s really fun to use.  So what do think?  Does this make you re-appraise your mobile advertising plans?

If you want more analysis on this story read Ray Anderson’s post on blog.bango.com

“Mobile advertising for the masses” White paper, volume 2. Get to see the real mobile data for yourself!

“Mobile advertising for the masses “ by MSearchGroove Chief analyst Peggy Anne Salz, is now ready  to download! 
Visit bango.com/whitepaper2 to get your copy now.

In this white paper, Peggy analyzes how brands could find their ways into “mobile advertising nirvana” through mobile social networking sites and different analytics results to fine tune your campaigns and understand your target market.
As you may now, mobislim.wap.com was the testing site for this white paper and the site hosted a Body Mass Index (BMI) Java application that calculates exactly that, your body mass.
We ran 3 different campaigns on 3 mobile social networking sites

1. Itsmy
2. Peperonity
3. Buzzcity

We targeted US and UK but of course we got traffic from many other countries (?), the total budget for each of the sites was $200, $100 for each territory. We used Bango tracking links to track unique visitors, countries our visitors came from, handsets they were using, network operators and time of the day they where clicking.

To get to see the results by yourself you just have to access our open Bango Analytics platform and do the following:

1. In the welcome screen, click in Analytics Center

2. Change the dates to 15th January 2009 to 19th January 2009. Those are the dates we run the campaigns.

Scroll down to Campaigns (tracking links) and click view full report

4. Once there you can see all the tracking links we used for the campaigns. These are: Admob BMI US Admob BMI UK Buzzcity BMI Itsmy UK Itsmy US

5. You can drill down on each of the tracking links to see daily page views, unique visitors, operators, devices and countries. You can also export traffic reports to see the referrer information and time of the date that those clicks happened.

Come back and ask as any questions you have, and if you need any help, you know this blog is the place to ask.

Enjoy the white paper!

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“If you talked to people the way advertisers talk to people, they’d punch you in the face!” AIME seminar on Mobile Advertising

There’s a sweet spot between mobile social networking and mobile advertising, with many people suggesting that not only will
ads fund social networking on mobile, but it will be one of the key drivers of mobile advertising, due to the popularity of
these sites, with their high engagement and repeat usage.

Bango is sponsoring the AIME seminar:
Mobile Advertising and the rise of Social Networking:
What does it mean for brands, agencies and service providers?
2 April 6.30pm-8pm with networking afterwards
London, UK

Come along and find out more about this exciting topic.

With contributions from top analysts such as MSearchGroove’s Peggy Salz, as well as industry insights from Bango, Flirtomatic,
Inside Mobile and the GSMA, this seminar takes a timely review of the reality of the mobile advertising marketplace and the
impact that social networking is having.

For full details and to register visit the AIME website

See you there!

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Santa Claus came from South Africa with mobile content from Acapella Productions

I’m very happy to share that Acappella Productions and mobislim.wap.com are going to be experimenting together with mobile advertising and Bango mobile analytics.
Following our campaign “All I want for Xmas is mobile content”, Acappella Productions will help to keep happy and healthy our mobile visitors with South African digital comedy brand, Comedy Twist Mobile.

This is going to be a very interesting experiment as they target South African users, and we are aiming to produce a case study focusing on this territory, to give a clear picture of what is happening in this market, and how South African visitors react to mobile advertising.
Let’s see what has been happening in the last month between South Africa and Mobislim in Bango mobile analytics:

– South Africa is the third largest country to bring traffic to mobislim.wap.com. Let’s bear in mind that in the last month, we have run a few campaigns for the upcoming white paper “Mobile advertising on mobile social networking sites” targeting only UK and US, so all this traffic is organic traffic.
– If we look at December’s traffic, in which we only run two small campaigns in Admob and Admoda targeting again UK and US, we can see that South Africa beats UK and US with organic traffic and that MTN South Africa is the number one operator bringing this traffic.

If you want to have a look yourself to see this information in more detail just visit mobilsim mobile analytics platform.

I would like to thank Ulrico Grech-Cumbo, Director of Acappella Productions for collaborating with us.  I look forward to this experience and to learn more and share with you our findings on the South African market.

Acappella Productions is a South African event production company. Acappella’s strong focus on live stand-up comedy lead to the introduction of it to the digital world in 2008, offering direct-to-customer premium mobile content. Acappella’s aim with Comedy Twist Mobile is to add value and promote wellness to people during these tough times; this is encapsulated in the brand’s slogan, “Live Life Laughing”.

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The Financial Times keep track of its mobile site with Bango mobile analytics

The Financial Times has recently launched a new version of the FT.com website optimised for mobile devices that uses

FTmobile site uses Bango mobile analytics

Bango’s mobile analytics to provide a deep understanding of the traffic to the site and track responses to marketing initiatives.

Using Bango’s Identifier technology, a user’s preferences are stored in their FT.com profile, so when they return they can quickly get to what interests them most. It is very good to see that serious businesses are taking mobile traffic seriously and best of all, offering a superb user experience for those on the go.

If you want to see by yourself what kind of data FT is seeing on their analytics platform you can have a look and see real traffic in real time coming to our mobislim site in Bango mobile analytics platform with just one click.

Read more about how the Financial Times is using Bango Mobile Analytics

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Mobile social networking white paper on its way!

Hello and Happy New Year!

We are starting the year with lots of  ideas to help  you to find your way in the mobile advertising and mobile analytics arenas. For that reason and following the success of the first white paper “Mobile Advertising for newbies”, now with more than 1,800 downloads, Bango has commissioned  a second white paper, this time about mobile advertising on mobile social networking sites. Peggy Anne Salz, author of the first whitepaper and Chief Editor of msearchgroove.com has accepted the challenge of writing volume 2 and I’m very happy to announce that mobislim.wap.com, our testing mobile site, has been chosen once again as the testing platform for the campaigns.

Some plans for volume 2:

– This time we will advertise an application free to download
– We’ll use banner ads rather than text ads where possible
– Target audience will be mobile social networking sites

The white paper will be ready around Mobile World Congress, and of course the hard data will be published in this blog. If you want to follow the campaigns in real time, keep an eye on our demo account, where you can see the traffic coming in real time. It will be very interesting to see in which countries these social networks are more active and which handsets people are using to access the service. Do people that are active in mobile social networks have a different profile than people surfing the mobile web? We will find out this and much more with Bango mobile analytics.

I look forward to work with Peggy on this white paper and I would like to wish you all the best for 2009!

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AdMob and Admoda, which ad network converts better?

Landing page for the campaign

I just run two parallel mobile advertising campaigns, one with AdMob for $100, as it is their minimum daily budget, and another one with Admoda for £50. The message was: FREE downloads to stay SLIM! – as you can see below, it was quite successful ;-). Target countries were the US and UK (although both ad networks sent me traffic from many more countries that the ones I wanted to target…)

The landing page contained 3 different tables ready to download to your mobile:
– Calories by drink
– Negative calorie foods
– Calories burnt by activity

Aren’t you curious to know which one was the most popular download? Let’s have a look at the results tracked by Bango mobile analytics!

Here is a quick summary:

Admob results by Bango Analytics

Admoda results by Bango Analytics

Now let’s have a look to the conversion rates with the goal comparison feature, which tell us from each campaign, how many people downloaded any of the calorie charts.

And the winner is….

Alcohol calories chart conversion rate

Calories by activity chart conversion rate

Negative calorie food chart conversion rate

So, AdMob total conversion rate was an average of 16.88% and Admoda reported a 25.26% conversion rate. These are quite high conversion rates, but I guess that making the content available for free and with the Xmas “fattening” season so close, people are a bit more conscious about these things!

If your curiosity knows no limits and you would like to see which countries are downloading which charts, and what devices or operators are more popular, go and check the results on our demo account. The tracking links you want to look at in the Campaign section of Bango Analytics are:
– Admob Xmas
– Admoda Xmas

Merry Xmas and happy mobile browsing for 2009!

Maria

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All I want for Xmas is mobile content!

Dear Santa,

It’s been over 20 years since I last wrote to you, but it’s taken some time to get over the disappointment of not getting the Cabbage Patch doll I wanted, you know.

This Christmas, though, I’ve only got one simple wish: I created a mobile site called Mobislim (you can visit it by typing in your mobile browser http://mobislim.wap.com) and I would love to fill it with funny content to make people laugh. It’s all for a good cause, Santa, as any money we make from the site will go to Save The Children charity. My kind bosses at Bango have agreed to match the money made from the sales – I’ll never call them Scrooge again!

I’m sure you’ll agree that laughter is the best way to stay healthy, so anyone who contributes to Mobislim will be promoted for free, and get the opportunity to test their content using mobile analytics.

So please, Santa, can I get some fun content – images, videos, jokes, articles and games – to put on my mobile site, this Christmas? You can send them to me at maria@bango.com and I’ll put all the best ones up. If you want to find out more, please visit the All I want for Xmas site in the Mobislim Blog.

With lots of love,

Maria

PS – I’ll leave extra chocolate chip cookies and a tall glass of milk for you by the Christmas tree.

PPS – If you can arrange for a shiny new 3G iPhone or a date with George Clooney, I also really wouldn’t mind!

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