By Nisheeth Mohan

If you are marketing mobile content via a carrier deck, you know that you can't relax just because your content secured a position.

The relative position in the deck is all-important to your revenue stream.

Nielsen Mobile did a study several years ago in which it reported that "mobile games promoted on a carrier's New, Featured or Best Seller decks saw 90 percent more downloads than when those same games were not promoted.

Furthermore, titles that got top shelf placement on the first page of the carrier's deck achieved 53 percent more downloads than when those titles appeared on subsequent pages of the deck." The revenue impact to a content provider is huge.

Note that in 2008, ring tone revenues were projected to be more than a $500 million by BMI and mobile gaming was expected to hit $5.4 billion in 2008, according to Jupiter Research.

Clearly, it is worth some time and effort to monitor your carrier deck placement. You also probably know that this isn't easy.

Early knowledge of changes in placement in the deck -- both of your content and that of your competitors -- can help you with revenue projections, product planning and quality control strategies.

Unfortunately, most monitoring strategies today are pretty rudimentary.

Someone -- and probably several people -- in your company have to manually go through carrier decks on different phones to check your placement; the process is slow and tedious.

I talked to one deck provider who related a company strategy of mandatory weekend sessions where employees sat with a variety of cell phones and a checklist to confirm their content positions.

Worse, you can't just do it once. Ongoing vigilance is critical to make sure that you are on top of your visibility -- and monitoring those games or ringtones that outrank you on a deck.

There are third-party companies that track carrier decks and provide weekly reports, but this kind of solution, while reducing the wear and tear on your team, still does not provide the real-time information and immediate diagnostic capability you need to stay on top in this game.

Ideally, you want your team to be able to monitor carrier decks from the comfort of their desktops -- easily accessing the deck from a wide variety of device profiles to navigate the deck and track content placement.

Rapid iteration and flexibility allow you to thoroughly monitor your position in a reasonable amount of time.

Tracking placement, in essence, should be as easy as monitoring the performance of your content itself -- and, by the way, effective content monitoring, real-time alarms, and rapid diagnostic and problem-solving capabilities are also important for maintaining your position in carrier decks.

The last thing you want is to hear from a carrier that its users are complaining about your content.

You want to be proactive about identifying and correction problems before they get out of hand. Carriers take a dim view of end user complaints.

In the highly competitive world of mobile content, carrier deck placement can make a huge difference.

Find a monitoring strategy that works for you and employ it regularly to keep your carriers, your customers and your revenue stream happy.

Nisheeth Mohan is product manager for mobile solutions and technology at Keynote Systems Inc., San Mateo, CA. Reach him at .