By Nisheeth Mohan

Have you noticed that the competition for eyeballs for mobile Web offerings is getting stiffer? You are not alone.

JupiterResearch recently published a study that stated that roughly 40 percent of Web site operators have launched mobile sites and another 22 percent plan to do so in the next year.

In a market where annualized data revenues have grown by more than an order of magnitude in only four years to $23.2 billion in 2007 (CTIA numbers), it is not surprising that everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon.

But JupiterResearch also points out that the astonishing growth in mobile sites "is relatively large given that the experience is not yet mature today and likely reflects mobile versions that consist of frames and offer a kludgy user interface."

As a marketer taking advantage of this exciting new technology, you recognize that poor performance is not going to catapult you to mobile success.

But how do you ensure that you are getting the information that you need to ensure that the rich experience you've built is not bogging down performance? Are potential customers abandoning your site before their transactions are completed?

To be successful in this market it is necessary to have a test and monitoring strategy in place that allows you to not only optimize how your product will be experienced before it is released, but also to continuously monitor how it is performing in a dynamic environment.

I was recently involved in solving a problem where a well-known site could not download over a popular carrier. A mobile monitoring system was first used to identify the failure. Even with diagnostics, it took a month to resolve the issue due to the number of entities involved in bringing the service to consumers.

Another crucial element for success is understanding the competition and making sure that your mobile Web offering is keeping pace.

It is important to have a monitoring strategy that compares your performance with others in your category. In a young market, there are both objective and relative standards of performance, you want to make sure that your mobile offering is performing well above the median mark.

There is no better marketing slogan than being able to tout your performance as being better than your competition.

The value of a robust monitoring strategy for making sure that your mobile service is performing as expected cannot be overstated.

The mobile ecosystem consists of numerous players, all of whom must get it right to maintain the experience that you want for your end users. When things go wrong, you need to know immediately to begin to take corrective action.

Nisheeth Mohan is product manager for mobile solutions and technology at Keynote Systems Inc., a mobile and Internet test and measurement services firm in San Mateo, CA. Reach him at .