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Raising the ante on metrics for mobile advertising

By Guy Yaniv

In a previous column I raised the question of whether advertisers really know what they get for their advertising dollars. The industry is still challenged by the whole notion of metrics and finding the best ways to assess the real value of advertising.

Historically, it has always been difficult to measure the effectiveness of advertising. The first advertisement appeared in a newspaper in 1704. Since then, the main metric used by the advertising industry for measuring exposure to ads is the number of "eyeballs." In the newspaper business, this figure is derived from the number of readers based on circulation figures.

In the early days of the online world, advertisers used the number of page loads to measure eyeballs and to monitor traffic on a given site. Wanting to keep the content fresh, some publishers started to use scripts that refreshed the page every 10 seconds, which resulted in inflated numbers of site visitors. In response, the industry started to talk about "unique users."

Later on, analytic tools evolved and enabled publishers to know which operating system visitors use, their IP addresses, users' trail along the site pages and how they navigate through the site.

Despite this information availability, it is still difficult to extract exactly who the site visitors are and their level of engagement with the site. Yet these analytics did enable advertisers to adopt a more advanced measurement than eyeballs for measuring effectiveness -- the click-through-rate. If users click through an ad, it means the ad was effective in catching their attention and driving them to action.

But what if clicking is not the answer? Maybe the real metric should be how many users have actually engaged with the brand?

Today there are companies like Nuconomy that offer tools to measure user engagement on top of all the traditional online metrics of page loads and unique users. Site owners can track individual actions such as number of users who viewed each millisecond of video, number of users who published a comment, rated a video and interacted in chat.

This information adds a lot of value to the clicks-around-a-site information. The ultimate result is the ability to analyze the combination of all metrics described above and deriving meaningful insights from it.

Advertising on the mobile phone matches and raises the ante when it comes to metrics. Wireless carriers not only know how many times each banner ad was displayed, but also which users clicked on it, together with those users' preferences, history and behavior.

Such carrier tracking goes for the entire mobile advertising inventory -- from WAP banners, ringback tone advertising, in-game advertising to advertising on SMS and MMS, both person-to-person and push.

These multiple channels together provide strong display capabilities to serve advertisers' general marketing goals. Call for action options such as click-to-call, short codes and links to WAP sites make it easy for users to act on first impulse, which is the moment of greatest opportunity.

Above all, every element of the process is highly measurable, trackable and interactive. User profiles are constantly updated based on their behavior, enhancing their value to advertisers. Carriers can leverage their rich knowledge base to gain deep insight into consumers' behavior unlike any other medium, maximizing an advertiser's return on investment.

Guy Yaniv is vice president and general manager of Comverse Mobile Advertising, Tel Aviv, Israel. Reach him at .