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How mobile analytics can increase campaign ROI

By Andy Bovingdon

With the extensive reach of mobile devices and more people using their mobile to browse the Web, mobile advertising has quickly become an essential way for online marketers to engage and ultimately generate more revenue from this audience.

According to Juniper Research, global spending on mobile Internet advertising will be $500 million this year.

Mobile advertising provides click-through rates ten times higher than traditional online advertising and the unique ability to effectively target a broad demographic of consumers. 

So in order to know where they should invest their marketing dollars, online marketers need to turn to mobile analytics tools to obtain accurate data, target and personalize their offering and to measure campaign ROI.

Ask any marketer what it thinks the key for running a successful campaign is and the answer will be ?good customer engagement? ? capturing the attention of quality prospects and getting them to efficiently click through to the site and achieve a specific goal. 

With accurate measurement marketers, get a full understanding of the true ROI of any campaign.

There are four important metrics that online marketers should consider:

Impressions
An impression is where the advertisement is displayed to a prospect, usually through an ad network onto a publisher?s page. Typically a lot more is paid to have the ad displayed on sites with a perceived higher traffic value.

Clicks
When consumers respond to a message they will click on it and come through to the campaign landing page. This shows initial engagement with the message. Mobile click through rates are ten times higher than online.

Conversions
The number of people who go on to buy something, subscribe, sign up, read a specific message or achieve any other specified goal is the key to any campaign.

The perfect campaign will show equally high numbers of impressions, clicks and conversions. It means that those clicks that have been paid for are delivering real customers and value.

Repeat visits
A visitor may not convert on the first visit. It may take a number of visits before they are confident or compelled enough to convert. It is crucial to be able to identify all these repeat visits and build up a complete picture of visitor habits to see the full value of campaigns.

But how can online marketers ensure they get more repeat visits without having to invest more of their marketing budget? This is where mobile analytics comes in.

With mobile analytics tools, marketers get an accurate view and have the ability to record all future visits and conversions against each individual, allowing them to understand the lifetime value for customers.

Marketers can easily link customers with the highest ongoing value back to specific campaigns to get the best measure of true ROI.

Accurate unique visitor identification and effective targeting are crucial. Mobile enables marketers to go that extra mile and really engage with customers. 

Using mobile analytics to obtain precise unique visitor identification forms a solid foundation for all campaign metrics. It allows them to track repeat visitors, personalize their offering and reward loyalty through offers and targeted information that keeps customers coming back.

Accurate identity of mobile visitors also gives them the power to see potential click fraud throughout the duration of a mobile advertising campaign. They can identify and monitor multiple clicks from individual visitors.

It is crucial to highlight the importance of using an analytics tool designed for mobile.

Traditional PC Web analytics solutions rely on JavaScript, cookies and IP addresses to identify a visiting browser ? these techniques alone simply do not deliver accurate results on mobile.

The best mobile analytics products are based on an anonymous but persistent user ID that also uses authenticated network information. This approach works across the wide range of mobile handsets and connection types. It gives companies real-time information about mobile visitors, marketing campaigns and Web sites.

So when looking at ways to increase campaign ROI, mobile marketers should look hard at the accuracy of their existing analytics solutions and their ability to really identify individual visitors.

It is worth comparing existing metrics with those from a real mobile analytics solution. Only accurate, real-time data will allow them to react quickly and maximize their ROI.

Andy Bovingdon is Cambridge, England-based vice president of product marketing of Bango, a provider of mobile billing and mobile analytics services. Reach him at .