Making the most of mobile data

June 30, 2008

Ray Anderson is CEO of Bango

By Ray Anderson

Measurement is critical to any business. So it is particularly important to ensure that the products you choose for measuring mobile delivers depth, breadth and accuracy of information needed.

Retail stores use loyalty cards to track customer spending patterns, with managers paying close attention to visitor routes through the shop to optimize sales.

Online, things are no different.

Measurement is all about customers – the people visiting your site, interacting with your campaigns, downloading and purchasing your content. And just like the store, accurate measurement depends on the ability to identify physical individuals.

By its very nature, the mobile Web lends itself to measurement – a phone is personal, always on and with your customer 24/7.

But, as the industry is starting to see, mobile analytics is not so easy given that traditional Web techniques do not work – no JavaScript to track page views, no cookies to mark visitors and IP addresses belonging to the network operator rather than the end user.

Once you are collecting data, it is important to know how to read it and what points are most important.

Here are some tips to keep in mind.

User ID is important. The thing that makes a mobile handset unique is the mobile phone number.
Unfortunately operators and consumers are reluctant to give out their numbers in fear of spam.

But fortunately, the most advanced mobile analytics products use a range of information to deliver a persistent user ID. Use this ID as your index to storing information you collect yourself.

For example, if you know the visitor’s phone number through a text campaign, link it to their analytics user ID. You can use this ID to avoid complex login pages and to personalize your site for each customer.

The MNO and carrier is important too. This also gives you the visitor’s country and other information, but take care as some MNOs also support MVNOs. Virtual networks such as Boost Mobile which use the Sprint network have very different consumer demographics.

Since multiple carriers are using the same infrastructure it becomes harder to distinguish between networks, so choose a mobile analytics service that has the ability to do this if you want to target specific carrier demographics.

Next, remember that an individual’s handset can show you more than you think. The type of handset can tell you quite a bit about the visitor. A BlackBerry is associated with business while a Sony Walkman phone may represent a music lover.

And measure pages. Many mobile analytics products embed a small image on each page to track navigation across a site. For this to work, it is important to have the tracking code on each page.

Also consider placing tracking codes on blogs, mobile social sites, desktop pages and in emails.

Recording which links your visitors are clicking gives you a better picture of their navigation and decision process. Measure the links from advertisements and search terms into your site to understand which messages work best. Measure links out to other sites owned by partners or by advertisers.

 If you have a popular desktop site, leverage the traffic and redirect some of it to your mobile site. Track this to show the success of desktop Web promotion.

In text campaigns vary text keywords with location to collect data about specific locations or personal preference.

With payments, offering something for a cost clearly marks your most loyal visitors. Many will opportunistically download stuff, but only the top percent will pay for premium content

Ray Anderson is Cambridge, England-based CEO of Bango, a mobile Internet services provider. Reach him at