U.S. mobile Web usage to surpass global leader Britain

By Mickey Alam Khan

August 26, 2008

WAPping increase

Mobile Web usage in the United States will surpass Britain this month, according to mobile analytics company Bango.

July data show that 18.88 percent of all mobile Web traffic to the 100,000 sites analyzed by Bango originates from the U.S. This is marginally lower than the 19.35 percent British traffic to mobile Web sites.

“What we’re seeing quite dramatically in the last 18 months is that the mobile Web is being taken up in America,” said Adam Kerr, vice president of Bango North America, New York.

“It’s growing much faster than anywhere else and next month we expect the U.S. to surpass the U.K.,” he said.

India accounted for 10.82 percent of all mobile Web traffic in July via Bango, followed by South Africa’s 8.82 percent and Indonesia’s 4.08 percent.

Smashing advice

The U.S. was up in July from 14.22 percent of all mobile Web traffic in June.

Bango, Cambridge, England, identifies users through country and network of origin.

The company ranks by measuring the number of user visits to mobile Web sites from each country.

Adam Kerr is vice president of Bango for North America

“When someone comes to our clients’ site for the first time, we give them a digital fingerprint,” Mr. Kerr said. “So the next time they come back, we can identify them.”

The increase in mobile Web usage in the U.S. is attributed to several reasons.

Top among them are better mobile handsets, more consumer-friendly data plans and quicker network speeds using 3G to pull up mobile Web pages.

“Now the handsets are great and they’re marketed really well,” Mr. Kerr said.

“Now that they have the tools in their hands you’ll see a big uptake of the mobile Web,” he said. “Once people discover the mobile Web on their phone, they tend to use it more and more.”

How the cookie crumbles
This latest data was released a month after it was announced that mobile ad network Millennial Media has integrated Bango’s mobile analytics into its Decktrade marketplace platform (see story).

Bango Analytics will enable Decktrade users to accurately track unique visitors responding to mobile ad campaigns.

The integration of Bango Analytics into the Decktrade platform enables any advertiser to add a Bango campaign tracking link to a campaign, thereby enabling tracking of unique visitors, country, network and device.

Bango recently launched a new version of its analytics software, which features new technology that tracks site and campaign data (see story).

With site analysis added to its mobile analytics service, Bango now provides the two metrics most sought after by Web site owners: the number of unique visitors and campaign tracking.

Tracking unique visitors is most sought after because current tools on the market can't accurately do this since cookies aren't reliable on mobile phones. Moreover, the IP addresses belong to the network operator.

Cookies aren’t a reliable indicator of mobile Web traffic, Mr. Kerr said.

“The vast majority of handsets don’t support cookies,” he said.

Still, marketers must be equipped to deal with the expected increase in mobile Web traffic nationwide.

“More people [worldwide] are browsing the Internet on their cell phone than on the PC,” Mr. Kerr said.

“If the company hasn’t got a mobile Web presence, they should get one as soon as possible,” he said. “They really need to understand what their consumers are doing on their mobile devices.”