Mobile Advertising For Newbies
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Mobile advertising for newbies
1. Mobile for the masses
2
1.1
The next big thing
2
1.2
Advertising is content
3
2. The great experiment 2.1
Ready to rumble
3. Analytics
10 14
21
3.1 The measure of success
22
3.2 Seeing is believing…
23
4. Conclusion
31
Mobile advertising for newbies The adventure begins… Despite the promise of significant revenues, the mobile advertising market is still in its infancy. Admittedly, some of the obstacles are no doubt linked to the technical and business issues I outline in section 1 (issues outside the scope of this paper). However, my discussions with agencies and digital marketers tell a different story. They want to move into mobile but need some help. The market is clearly poised for significant growth, but only if the Long Tail of advertisers and publishers can get on board. They need a roadmap and this is why it’s critical to have a ‘how-to’ white paper at this juncture. The purpose of this hands-on research is to give the inside track on the procedure to set up and measure the results of three mobile campaigns: Google, Decktrade (Millennial Media) and Mo'Jiva. I have chosen to use a small-scale mobile site created by Bango called Mobislim (mobislim.wap.com), which offers a light-hearted look at weight-loss tips. But my investigation into mobile advertising won't stop there. This white paper will be followed shortly by the launch of a dedicated blog at my own site, MSearchGroove. (Marketers who can't wait can follow progress across these and other campaigns as it happens, by visiting the accompanying Mobislim blog (mobislim.wordpress.com) to see the three campaigns cited in this white paper. In addition, marketers can try out their own mobile advertising campaigns, directing traffic to the Mobislim mobile site if they don’t have one of their own.)
Enjoy! Peggy Anne Salz Chief Analyst, Publisher MSearchGroove
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1. Mobile for the masses The emergence of empowered consumers, the advance of so-called digital natives – individuals who have grown up with the Internet – and the abundance of applications designed to give consumers more of a say in how they create, access and enjoy content, have transformed publishing and advertising. But it's the addictiveness, pervasiveness and sheer dominance of the mobile device that gives it a pivotal position in our daily lives. Everything we can do on the Internet with our PCs, we can also do on our mobile phones. What's more, the phenomenal popularity of location-based services, made-for-mobile social networks such as itsmy.com and BuzzCity's myGamma, and a host of schemes that encourage moblogging (mobile blogging) as well as content capture and creation on the fly, pave the way for mobile to be the next – and potentially most dominant – mass media. This is the view of Tomi Ahonen, independent consultant, mobile luminary and author of the newly released book, Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media: Cell phone, Cameraphone, iPhone, smartphone. In this context, Ahonen refers to mobile as the 7th of the mass media, following print from the 1500s, recording from the 1900s, cinema from the 1910s, radio from the 1920s, TV from the 1950s, and Internet from the 1990s. He further concludes that all forms of content will "ultimately converge around the cell phone."
1.1 The next big thing The power of mobile begins with its reach. There are twice as many mobile devices as TV sets, three times as many mobile subscribers as Internet users, and four times as many mobile phones as PCs. Mobile is also very versatile as a media channel if we consider that it is digital, multimedia-capable, personal and interactive. It not only has the ability to deliver broadcast content. A growing number of mobile content companies and network operators are convinced the mobile will be the main device people use to enjoy radio and TV programming anytime, anywhere.
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The capabilities of the mobile phone are uniquely suited to generate massive new mobile advertising opportunities: Everyone has them (high volume) Everyone carries them around (always on, always connected) Everyone can use their user input mechanisms to interact with brands/publishers (camera phones/SMS text/voice) Everyone can use them to pay for content and services (a built-in payment mechanism)
Indeed, mobile can replicate everything that all previous six mass media can do. It's what Ahonen tells me will make mobile "at least as disruptive as the Internet has been so far." People can consume newspapers, read magazine articles and books, listen to podcasts and radio, buy songs and video games and even watch whole movies on their mobile phone.
It's clear mobile will also be the primary way brands and publishers engage with us – on our terms – to deliver their marketing message.
1.2 Advertising is content In his July column in Technology Weekly, Andrew Bud, Executive Chairman of mBlox, a company that operates a major mobile transaction network, summed up the potential of the mobile advertising market simply and succinctly. The market value is "over-estimated in the short term and under-estimated in the long term." Granted there are issues – such as device and operating systems fragmentation, confusion in the emerging value chain, pricing, and a lack of sufficient inventory (issues well outside the scope of this white paper) – which could seriously slow the growth of mobile advertising. (In fact, these disconnects are expertly examined and discussed by Chetan Sharma and his colleagues Joe Herzog and Victor Melfi in their milestone book Mobile Advertising: Supercharge Your Brand in the Exploding Wireless Market.)
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Despite these disconnects, there is a significant increase in the number of mobile advertising success stories documented on a daily basis on news sites such as MobiAdNews and Mobile Marketer Daily. Brands are getting on board – but that is only one driver. We'll likely see an increase in the number of mobile campaigns as more mobile services (such as mobile voice/text and data plans) are increasingly subsidized by mobile advertising. Virgin Mobile's Sugar Mama service offers mobile users extra voice minutes in exchange for viewing targeted mobile advertising. South Africa's Vodacom uses advertising to subsidize mobile data services for much of its pre-paid customer base. Australian MVNO ComTel Corporation, Ltd. has launched SMSPup Mobile, the country’s first advertising subsidized mobile phone service.
Hidden meaning It may seem that mobile advertising and mobile marketing are two interchangeable terms that refer to the same thing. However, there are fundamental differences. The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) defines mobile marketing as “the use of wireless media as an integrated content delivery and direct response vehicle within a cross-media or stand-alone marketing communications program.” Mobile advertising, a subset of mobile marketing, is also a way to deliver a marketing message, but the focus is much more on achieving – and measuring – concrete results. Mobile ads features and formats include banner ads, SMS/MMS ads, full screen interstitials that appear while a requested mobile Web page loads, as well as paid search advertising (associated with keywords).
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Advertising is results
Blyk breaks the mould
Mobile advertising is an effective vehicle to reach and engage with people – and the click-through rates literally speak volumes.
The world’s first ad-funded MVNO marked its one year anniversary in late September. The Finland-based company broke on the scene in the U.K. last year, offering 16 to 24 year-
People try to make this comparison
olds 217 free text messages and 43
between online and mobile and if
call minutes a month in return for
you look at the click-through rates you tend
accepting up to six advertising messages per day. Since then the
to get from an online banner it’s microscopic. It's .02 percent, it’s .05 percent. If you look at mobile advertising, you’re seeing 1-3 percent click-through
model has gained serious traction, and some 100 advertisers, including major brands such as Coca-Cola, L’Oreal and Sky, are lining up to push
rates as an industry standard.
advertising messages to youths who
Aaron Watkins VP of Mobile Integration The Hyperfactory
have expressed an interest in hearing what the brands have to say. Blyk counts over 1,000 campaigns to date,
Mobile ads deliver high click rates
and reports an average response rate
averaging above 1 percent, plus
of 25 percent (!) No doubt this
high conversions rates – 5x better than
success is linked to Blyk's bleeding-
online advertising for some products and
edge approach to mobile advertising
services.
(no spam – no way) and customer profiling (drilling down to deliver the
Eric Eller Senior VP Marketing Millennial Media
right ad to the right person), but it should stand as an example of what a well executed mobile advertising campaign can deliver.
Mobile ad click-through rates fluctuate from 2 percent to 20 percent. But they are consistently higher than online. Mobile is also vastly more effective, in part because the lack of clutter. One banner ad per mobile Web page is more engaging than the dozens that crowd the average Internet website. In fact, one of Nokia's advertisers reports ads on mobile are outperforming Web ads by eight times. Diana LaGattuta Global marketing Nokia Interactive
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We know that click-through rates on mobile ad campaigns are substantially higher than they are online. Put another way, results can peg the needle – but how do we get there from here? Develop campaigns that match our target audience. (Even better if we integrate some element of contextual relevancy, but let's learn to walk before we try to run at this point .) Offer some form of immediate gratification, such as a free download, the chance to take a free quiz or just the freedom to express an opinion. (Blyk has had tremendous success with campaigns that combine SMS and MMS messages to start a conversation with the consumer – in the form of a yes/no question - and then clinch the deal with a strong creative.) Think mobile and personal.
Advertising is connection Finally, mobile is the way to connect with the next billion and the growing middle-class of consumers in Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC countries), for whom the mobile is the first and only interactive screen. As John du Pre Gauntt, eMarketer Senior Analyst and author of the mobile advertising report, Mobile Advertising: After the Growing Pains, points out: "Marketers who do not meet these new customers on their increasingly mobile terms will be displaced by those who do." The stakes are high and so is the pay-off. Euromonitor estimates the size of the middle-class in BRIC countries (people with yearly incomes over $3,000) will have doubled between 2006 and 2009. And this doesn't count the millions of people joining the middle-classes in Latin America, South Africa, and Eastern Europe. There's a world of opportunity. But we miss out if we can't identify and target the countries where browsing the mobile Web is popular among consumers. Even better if we can monitor activity across countries in real-time and factor it into our evolving mobile advertising
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strategies. In a global mobile industry information is indeed a form of power and being able to pick up on consumer tastes and trends early, particularly in emerging and developing markets, can mean the difference between success and failure of a campaign.
Advertising is most effective where consumers are most receptive.
To help us identify where the action is and target countries where Web browsing activity is highest – Bango, a provider of real-time mobile analytics and mobile billing services, publishes analysis on the top countries browsing the mobile Web, as well as the countries that lead the pack in buying mobile services and content. Bango has visibility in what over 20 And the numbers speak volumes – literally.
million users browsed and bought on the mobile Web during the past year. How does it know this? Bango's technology allows it to assign a unique user ID based on information Bango gathers from browser analysis, session information and its long-established billing relationships with mobile operators. This unique user ID – often referred to as a digital fingerprint – enables Bango to distinguish between new and repeat users and therefore quantify precisely the number of unique visitors to a given mobile website.
This pie chart shows that the bulk of mobile browsing is actually coming from countries such as the U.K., the U.S. and India. In comparison, browsing activity across countries including South Africa, Indonesia, Spain and Turkey reaches only the single digits. (Ironically, our assumptions about the booming BRIC markets are not borne out by the hard data. So far only one of the BRIC countries - India - appears in the Top 10 as reported by Bango, and Brazil hovers around at 12th position.)
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If you want to see the mobile Web in action, then check out Bango's live feed – the only one of its kind - which shows content being browsed and bought across over 180 countries and 350 mobile networks – at www.bango.com/live
AdMob, a mobile marketplace offering mobile advertising and analytics solutions, provides a regular snapshot of the data it collects from its vantage point in the ecosystem. By way of background, AdMob sees ad requests from 5,000+ publishers’ sites in over 160 countries, and analyzes the data to produce the AdMob Mobile Metrics Report covering manufacturer, device and country-specific data on AdMob's top six markets by impressions served: U.S., U.K., India, Indonesia, South Africa, and the Philippines. The August 2008 AdMob Mobile Metrics Report, gives us a look at traffic since it launched the report in September 2007. It tells us that Asia leads the pack for ad requests and traffic growth (although the company tells me this may also be attributed in part to a few key publisher deals and increased AdMob activities in the region).
Again, the BRIC countries figure in the results, but the real news is continued growth in maturing mobile markets such as North America and Western Europe.
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AdMob served over 3.6 billion ads in August 2008 and the AdMob AdMonitor provides a small sample of these ad requests in real-time. You can check it out at www.admob.com/s/home/live
How big is the mobile advertising opportunity? The jury is out on this one. But, as in the early days of all mega-trends, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Fortunately, these forecasts agree on one thing: the outlook is positive and dipping a toe in the water is a great way to ride the wave. Emarketer forecasts that worldwide mobile marketing and advertising will reach $19 billion by 2012. Gartner estimates the worldwide mobile advertising market will be worth more than $12 billion by 2011. The Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) expects the U.S. market for adfunded mobile entertainment will grow to $336.35 million by 2013. ABI Research reckons the global mobile marketing industry was worth $1.8 billion in 2007 and is expected to grow to $24 billion by 2013.
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2. The great experiment The purpose of this section is to provide helpful hints and tips on running mobile advertising campaigns. Section 3 will analyze the results of three real campaigns based on three days of data.
Methodology: Three campaigns advertising a free download (a chart of daily activities and the amount of calories they burn). (See image right.) Each campaign had a daily budget of $15 (GBP10) and a bid per click of $0.15 (GBP0.10). Each campaign targeted the U.S. and the U.K. – no limitation on handset types, screen sizes or mobile operator network. (There is an option across the ad networks I tested that allows you to target ads to specific
Mobislim campaigns landing page
handsets or networks, but I'll reserve that for future campaigns. Keep in mind Google allows you to target specific operators but not handsets; Decktrade allows you to do both, as does Mo'Jiva.)
Ad networks: Chosen at random to provide an even spread of size and scope. Google – Synonymous with paid search advertising Decktrade from Millennial Media – A display ad network that served close to 3 billion impressions per month in August. Mo’Jiva – A smaller ad network that opened for business in May 2008. Since then the company claims (in a June press release) to have reached a "milestone of serving more than 70 million ads and holding over 120 million in advertising inventory in the sixty days after launching its services." To be clear, there are many other ad networks and my investigation of mobile advertising will broaden over time to include many of these as well.
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Large ad network Online set-up Global Caters for a range of budgets
Medium ad network Online set-up Global Strong presence in social networking sites Caters for a range of budgets
Medium ad network Online set-up Global Provides adult advertising inventory
Medium ad network Apply online Global Strong US presence
Small ad network Online set-up Asia pacific & South Africa Strong presence in India
Medium ad network Apply online Global (predominantly Europe & US focused) Strong presence in social networking
Medium ad network Apply online Global
Small ad network Online set-up Global Strong presence in India
Large ad network Online set-up Global Caters for a range of budgets
Large search ad network Online set-up Global Caters for a range of budgets
Medium search ad network Apply online Global Caters for a range of budgets
Large search ad network Easily set up by contacting MCN Global Caters for a range of budgets
Medium ad network Online set-up Global Caters for a range of budgets
Medium search and display ad network Online set-up Global Strong US carrier presence
Large search ad network Apply online Global Display and search advertising
For a comprehensive and up to date list of mobile advertising providers, visit the Mobislim blog www.mobislim.wordpress.com
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Mobile analytics: I chose Bango and AdMob as two best examples of analytics packages on the market today. In the campaigns below, I also show the procedure for inserting the campaign tracking code. In brief:
Bango – Pretty straightforward. Sign up for a mobile analytics account, and get your individual tracking number. This unique tracking link - which points to the URL of your choice – essentially follows and records user interaction with a particular landing page, event, campaign or conversion. It's your call, and the procedure doesn't change – no matter what.
AdMob – Slightly more involved. Mobile analytics allows you to track a specific page and features step-by-step instructions you can follow to obtain a tracking link. But it can be tricky.
In my case, because my campaign URL already contained a "?", it was a matter of trial and error to get the click-through URL up and running. News to me: The standard procedure for passing values within the URL - such as the name of my campaign – requires me to know that these values should be separated with &. However, a "?" in my URL and in the piece of code AdMob asked me to tack onto my URL, stopped this process short. To complicate matters, an issue in the original code provided by AdMob, and which I added to my mobislim site (this is a procedure AdMob requires as a rule), was revealed to have a deeper flaw that effectively caused it to ignore the very value I wanted to track. Fortunately, teams at AdMob and Bango found a solution and it's back to business as usual .
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Again, there are other offers on the market and my research will broaden to include them over time. However, some solutions (such as Amethon) cater to large publishers and brands and not the Long Tail of advertisers and publishers, so choose your analytics package to match your needs. www.analytics.admob.com
www.amethon.com
Mobile only analytics from this
Packet sniffing solution that
ad network.
requires its own servers.
www.bango.com/analytics Mobile only analytics, hosted service.
www.google.com/analytics World’s most popular PC web analytics tool tracks smartphones.
www.mobilytics.net
www.nedstat.com
Mobile only analytics, hosted
Enterprise-level web analytics
service.
tool, has mobile handset detection.
www.omniture.com
www.quattrowireless.com
Enterprise-level web analytics
Mobile only analytics from this
tool, has mobile handset
ad network.
detection. www.wapalizer.com Mobile only analytics, hosted service.
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2.1
Ready to rumble
You have your campaign worked out and you're ready to go…
Google: Sign up for a Google account and set up your campaign. The process is a no-brainer and quite straightforward. Scroll down the page and follow the steps, choosing a name for the campaign. (My advice: Pick an ad group title that includes enough information about the campaign for you to identify and track it later. When you get to the point that you have several campaigns going at once, it can get confusing.)
Choose the geography and target consumers by location. Unsurprisingly, tight integration with Google Maps makes picking and visualizing the countries where this campaign will run a breeze.
Choose the ad type and the creative for it. Google provides a choice of ad types. You can choose to create an image ad, a local business ad, a mobile ad, and a click-to-play video ad. In this test, I choose a mobile ad.
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Click on the options that match your advertising goals. More choice. I have the option click-to-call (perfect for local businesses who want to connect with consumers on the fly), and I can target consumers by mobile operator network.
Insert Display and Destination URLs. If you use your own mobile site, as I have, then input your URL in the field marked Display URL. (Note: This URL can be your home page or a specific landing page, depending on what you wish to advertise and measure. In my case, I want to direct traffic to the page in the Mobislim site offering a free download of calorie-burning daily activities.) The Destination URL is where you would insert your tracking link – if you have chosen to use an analytics offer such as Bango or AdMob. You can also use Google Adwords Analytics. But be aware that they give you visibility into click-through rates, spending, and keyword performance. If you want to see conversion rates against goals (for a specific campaign) or would like to know more about your customers (their mobile operators or devices, for example), Google falls short. Note: Google offers the option to choose the mobile operator network (but not the handset) earlier on in the process. However, since I didn't want to limit my campaign to a specific operator, I chose to ignore this option. (To be clear: I do want to know which mobile operators are delivering the most traffic to my site, but that's information Google Adwords Analytics cannot yet provide).
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Select your keywords for your ad campaign. Need some inspiration? (I did!) Google's keyword tool help you find relevant keywords. Note: According to Wikipedia, the term keyword in reference to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) usually refers to a word or keyword phrase (combination of words) used to find relevant and useful web pages. In this case, it triggers the delivery of my ad.
Set your budget. Some networks set a minimum daily budget. With Google this is not a requirement. Review and save your ad campaign.
The procedure for setting up campaigns in Decktrade and Mo’Jiva is similar in many respects (they ask you to choose options and require you to input your Display and Destination URLs, for example.) It's great to see some uniformity, so rather than repeat the obvious, my analysis will focus on what is different and what you need to know.
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Decktrade: Sign in and set up your campaign. Decktrade lets you choose a product category and target specific countries, carriers and handsets. Once you've saved the name of the campaign and the Destination URL, you can move to the dashboard, where you can set up your bids, creatives, and channels. Select your channel(s). The channels are helpful, self-explanatory categories, but choosing one for my weightloss chart was tough. Likewise, I found myself wishing I could see the list of publishers grouped under each category.
It's about community, but it has little to do with social networking, sharing and all the other concepts that are grouped under this channel. I am offering a download, but I don't want my ad to show alongside offers for ringtones and wallpapers. That stretches the relevancy of my placement to the max. Entertainment. Hardly. News and information. Sort of – but not in the same league as many of the content providers/advertisers sure to be found here. Portals. Maybe. To be clear, Decktrade does explain these categories in detail on the site, but what to do when your content – like mine – doesn't fall neatly into one or even a few categories? My take: It's early days and this is one of those minor details ad networks across the board will work out as more publishers and advertisers get involved, bringing a greater variety of content with them.
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Select your budget. You can set your daily budget – there are no limits in either direction.
Select image or text. Decktrade is a display ad network, so there is a lot of flexibility around building and choosing your creative. (To be consistent with my other campaigns, I kept mine to a text banner.)
Review and send your campaign for approval.
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Mo’Jiva:
Create the campaign. A simple 6-step procedure to follow. Start off by inputting the tracking link in the space asking for the site URL you wish to advertise. Move on to the next step.
Targeting keywords Keywords are not an option. For some reason, "diet" the keyword most relevant to my weight-loss campaign, isn't on the money. By the looks of it neither is my campaign since it would only show across 171 sites and 574 pages… … To increase my reach I opt for one of Mo'Jiva's predefined channels. But will it come at the expense of relevancy? It's a conscious choice I make but I have to ask myself: Am I advertising where users will appreciate my message? Or will they be annoyed?
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Choose bids Interestingly, the minimum bid is pre-defined and rather pricey. I stick to my budget. A plus in my book: You have the option to run a Pay per view campaign.
Choose schedule Pick dates and times (I chose to ignore this option in my campaigns).
Review your campaign and send for approval. This generally takes one working day.
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3. Analytics Mobile is not PC. It may sound like a bit of a no-brainer, but the business implications are profound. For publishers and advertisers it changes all the rules. As Jonathan MacDonald, Senior Consultant Mobile Marketing at OgilvyOne Worldwide, a company focused on customer management and interactive marketing, correctly points out both at industry conferences and in his upcoming mobile advertising book, The Communication Ideal: It's time for a rethink. Mobile advertising isn't just about banners; it's about coordinating and cultivating two-way conversations with individuals and giving them a say in their advertising experiences. Think co-creation. Think communication. A full examination of the seismic shift in what mobile advertising is and is not is outside the scope of this white paper. For that, I suggest you follow coverage and guest columns at MSearchGroove and its network of partner sites.
Two constants you can count on: Retrofitting online campaigns for mobile is a flawed approach. No need to wait until whiz-bang technologies come online to deliver our advertising message. We can harness simple SMS and MMS formats, and we can drive positive results. (See Blyk breaks the mould, page 5.)
As I said, mobile is not PC. At a practical level, the fundamental differences between these mass media demand us to rethink how we measure the success of our campaigns, or the degree of their failure.
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Analytics on a PC revolves around the existence of embedded JavaScript code in the pages of a website. That works a treat on PCs because the majority of browsers support JavaScript. Mobile devices fail to support JavaScript sufficiently, so it’s not a reliable tracking mechanism. The same goes for cookies. They do work on some mobile browsers, but in the majority of cases they get lost, jumbled or removed when the user moves from one site to another. Again, not a reliable mechanism. Referral information, information that can indicate where the user has come from and recount the journey from Page A to Page B and so on, is also not reliable. Sure, smartphones are starting to pass information, but it’s not enough to understand precisely who is visiting a site and how they got there. Finally, the last resort, looking up the IP address, doesn’t work either as the process identifies the IP address of the mobile operator’s mobile gateway, and not the individual devices running on it.
3.1 The measure of success In this section, I examine the breadth and depth of campaign analysis offered by two solutions: AdMob Mobile Analytics and Bango Mobile Analytics. The aim here is not to compare how well my three campaigns performed. For that I would also need to acknowledge and address a laundry list of do's and don'ts around Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
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At the other end of the spectrum, poor performance could be my fault alone and linked to the campaign
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is
concept itself. (After all, offering a free download
defined by Wikipedia as a "form of
chart of calorie-burning daily activities may not be a
Internet marketing that seeks to
crowd-pleaser.)
promote websites by increasing their
Against this backdrop, I have made the conscious
visibility in search engine result
decision to note the features and functionalities of the
pages."
mobile analytics solutions (provided by AdMob and Bango) that provide me with answers to three of the all-important 5Ws every advertiser and publisher
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
needs to know: Who (are my customers)? What (did
is the process of editing and
they look at)? Where (did they come from)?
organizing the content on a webpage or across a website to increase its potential relevance to specific
You run a campaign to
keywords on specific search engines,
increase mindshare or market share
with the aim of achieving a higher
– or both. Tracking your results with a
organic search listing and thus
mobile analytics solution is the only
increasing the volume of targeted
reliable way to know if you are on the
traffic from search engines.
money – or wasting it.
3.2 Seeing is believing… Become familiar with the analytics solutions you implement and check them often. Making this part of your regular routine is essential to understanding your customers and refining your campaigns to achieve high performance. For the purpose of this white paper, I have chosen to review the results for my campaign (outlined in Section 2, page 10) for the period October 1 – October 3. (By way of background, the Mo'Jiva campaign was approved to run on October 1, but didn't. The cause: A combination of email overlap and a mix-up in the approval process – both harmless glitches that are no reflection on Mo'Jiva's management or professionalism. Rather
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than re–set the campaigns to start on October 3 and conclude on October 6, I opted to take the data from an identical test campaign I ran with Mo'Jiva a week before. Since I am examining the level of visibility AdMob and Bango provide me into the data – and not the performance of individual campaigns – this substitution does not impact my analysis or conflict with my methodology. )
Dashboards
AdMob and Bango dashboards both offer a wealth of information on customers. So how often do they update the analytics to provide me insight into just how well (or badly) my campaign is doing? AdMob analytics are updated daily – and the dashboard reporting is updated periodically. In comparison, Bango analytics are strictly realtime. What you see is what you get (got) – at that moment in time. Both solutions drill down into the results, features and functionalities I explore in the following screenshots.
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Tracking links Inserting tracking links allows me to see the click-throughs to my URLs. Both solutions allow me to compare ad networks and provide me a menu of options to drill down even further in the data. In the AdMob example, my focus is on the campaigns I have marked with a "". The dashboard shows me the number of visits. AdMob also shows me the average time spent on my campaign landing page. I have 21 visits to my Google campaign (octgoogle). Bango shows me the results for each campaign according to the Bango tracking number it was assigned by the system. I see that my Google campaign – titled October GOOGLE – had 18 page views. Bango also provides me with more information about this traffic in later screenshots.
(As I explained earlier in this section – the Mo'Jiva campaign in Bango started later, so I opted to use earlier data referring to an identical campaign titled October Mo'Jiva.)
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If you want to deep dive into my campaigns and what they achieved, then check out all the Mobislim campaigns as reported by Bango at mobislim.wordpress.com. AdMob does not yet have a mobile site you can road test for this purpose, so I will post the screenshots that illustrate the other two campaigns on my dedicated blog.
Campaign summary Now that I know how my campaigns did on the whole, I decide to analyze the results of my campaigns on an individual basis. For the purposes of this white paper (and so not to overwhelm you with pages of screenshots for three campaigns as reported by two mobile analytics solutions ), I have chosen to document the campaign I ran on Google only.
AdMob provides a drop-down menu to let me zero in on my Google campaign. Additional options (shown in grey under "Visits") provide me more information about this single campaign (or event), such as unique visitors, the level of engagement, where the traffic originates, which operators drive it, and specific device details.
Likewise, Bango allows me to focus exclusively on my Google campaign. It provides me with a handy at-aglance summary of what the numbers mean. Beneath this a menu of horizontal tabs walk me through unique visitors, where the traffic originates, which operators drive it, and specific device details. On the whole similar, but there are a few key differences as the screenshots below clearly illustrate. 26
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Unique visitors AdMob provides analysis of unique visitors based on 17.42% of site traffic. While the above screenshot documents that AdMob can provide me analysis of the total visits to my Google campaign, it's clear that AdMob cannot show me the details associated with the unique visitors to my campaign in real-time. How are unique visitors calculated based on a sample of traffic to my landing page? A box above the fold (pointed out by my blue arrow) clearly explains this procedure. Bango shows the number of unique visitors for each day of my three-day campaign. It also provides visibility into these same unique visitors by operator, by device, and by country.
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Operators, devices and geographies
AdMob and Bango analytics solutions provide comparable visibility into these areas. Rather than include a screenshot of each feature for each of the solutions, I have chosen to provide two screenshots that provide a good overview.
A surprise: I set up campaigns to run in the U.S. and the U.K., yet Bango reveals I am literally getting results from more countries than I bargained for. (Remember I pay for these clicks.) My Google campaign is getting traffic from three countries. My Decktrade campaign tops that, and reports users in six (!) countries are clicking on my ad. To drive the point home, I have chosen to show you a screenshot from my Decktrade campaign instead of the Google campaign just this once. My take: It's great that people everywhere are using the mobile Web, but it's clear that ad networks will have to develop more controls moving forward to ensure that customers clicking through on my ad are indeed based in the countries I target. It's early days, but I'm optimistic we'll get there.
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Drilling deeper AdMob gives me an overview of visitor engagement as measured by the average length of the visit, the depth of the visit (how many pages viewed), loyalty (a term it does not fully define), and visit interval. It's useful information based on what AdMob gleans from analyzing a percentage sample of my traffic and refreshing this periodically. A closer look at the length of time spent on my site, for example, reveals visits last between 0 and 10 seconds. (Hardly a surprise since I'm only offering a free download chart. Not much to read let alone engage with there.) Bango doesn't offer approximate information on engagement. But it does offer a breakdown of all unique visitors – and all in real-time. Put simply, Bango has the technology to assign each user a kind of digital fingerprint, what Bango calls the user ID, allowing it to record what individual users browse and buy as it happens. (This is explained in detail on page 7.)
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The number of unique visitors or the level of engagement? What matters most depends on your campaign objectives.
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And deeper AdMob tells me the top 10 keywords by visits, useful feedback that will no doubt allow me to fine-tune future campaigns to emphasize the terms AdMob reckons are the most popular. I have an issue with free porn being connected in any way with my free download chart, but that's no reflection on AdMob. It is an indication that one of my chosen ad networks doesn't take relevance as seriously I had hoped when it comes to placing my ad where customers will expect and appreciate it. Hmmm…A confirmation in my book that better targeting must become a business imperative moving forward. Otherwise, my ads will be seen and treated as spam.
Bango features a Revenue overview section, showing me how many customers got past my pitch to actually do something that made me money. (I didn't charge for content in my campaign but if I had, then this Bango feature could give me real-time visibility into my sales.) If you plan to charge for content, then a Bango tracking link will provide you visibility into revenue and conversion rates for each campaign/event, revealing how many customers clicked through to the payment page of your website, how many actually bought the content, and how much they spent. Invaluable information for any publisher of content.
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4 Conclusion Now that we've covered the basics of mobile advertising (setting up campaigns) and mobile analytics (measuring results), I invite you to try both out for yourself. You'll soon see how simple it is. If you don't have a mobile website, then test the waters by setting up a campaign (as I did) using the small-scale mobile site created by Bango called Mobislim (mobislim.wap.com). And remember: You can follow progress across the campaigns documented in this white paper – as well as a slew of campaigns in the pipeline – by visiting my own dedicated blog soon to launch at MSearchGroove. You can also check out coverage at the accompanying Mobislim blog (mobislim.wordpress.com), authored by my esteemed colleague Maria Sanchez. (Full disclosure here: Maria is a Bango marketing manager. She also calls them as she sees them. ) Her keen observations and good-natured rants, which she posts regularly on the Mobislim blog, are a perfect complement to my in-depth analysis and user-friendly clarification of the range of mobile advertising and mobile analytics tools and techniques at your disposal. Whatever site you choose to read, I hope you'll continue to experiment and learn. Mobile advertising is a brave new space with new rules and new rewards. As publishers and advertisers, we should be conscious that our efforts to achieve our business objectives can be compared to a marathon with no finish line. Success is a journey, not a destination. Great to have you along for the ride!
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This paper is sponsored by Bango
About Bango Bango is a leading provider of real-time mobile analytics for website owners, marketing agencies and advertisers. Our hosted service allows businesses worldwide to independently measure the importance and success of mobile marketing, allowing them to establish the strongest personal relationships with their customers through any mobile phone (mass market and smartphones). Bango delivers the benefits of traditional Web analytics to the fast growing mobile world, providing familiar metrics like unique visitors alongside new mobile metrics like geo-location by country, operator identification (including virtual networks) and handset information (make, model, features). Bango is a mobile Web pioneer and in addition to providing mobile analytics solutions, the company has over 7 years experience in mobile billing. Bango's customers use Bango's payments network to collect payments in over 150 countries worldwide and put the charge on the consumer's on their phone bill, credit/debit card or PayPal account. Read more at www.bango.com
The opinions expressed in this white paper are those of Peggy Anne Salz and MSearchGroove and do not reflect the opinions of the organizations referenced in this paper.
About Peggy Anne Salz Peggy Anne Salz is the chief analyst and publisher of MSearchGroove, an online source of analysis and commentary on mobile search, mobile advertising and social media. Her report, Mobile Search & Content Discovery – the first of its kind – establishes Peggy as an authority on mobile search and content discovery technologies enabling media companies and mobile operators to monetize content and services. Her drive to spark debate about issues impacting the industry at all levels has won her international recognition as a brave new voice in the mobile content market. She has established a successful consulting career based on vision, insight, versatility, and over 15 years of industry experience.
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About MSearchGroove MSearchGroove.com provides analysis and commentary on mobile search, mobile advertising and social media. Through primary research and interviews with c-level executives and industry luminaries, MSG is the essential read for companies seeking ways to monetize their digital assets, drive mobile advertising revenues and harness the power of empowered consumers.
Special thanks to Tom Thurston Tom is the creator of mobislim.wap.com mobile site. Tom is a Java programmer who discovered the mobile internet in 2004 and has been building mobile systems ever since. Tom has worked with the likes of Disney and Reuters to provide on and off deck mobile internet sites, has contributed to the Volantis mobile products used by mobile operators such as Orange, Three and Turkcell, has architected and developed industry leading mobile entertainment sites on the O2 portal and has created the Bango enabled content delivery platform used to sell mobile assets for almost every football club in the UK. For more info see themobiledeveloper.com
© Bango.net 2008
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1. Mobile for the masses
2
1.1
The next big thing
2
1.2
Advertising is content
3
2. The great experiment 2.1
Ready to rumble
3. Analytics
10 14
21
3.1 The measure of success
22
3.2 Seeing is believing…
23
4. Conclusion
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Mobile advertising for newbies The adventure begins… Despite the promise of significant revenues, the mobile advertising market is still in its infancy. Admittedly, some of the obstacles are no doubt linked to the technical and business issues I outline in section 1 (issues outside the scope of this paper). However, my discussions with agencies and digital marketers tell a different story. They want to move into mobile but need some help. The market is clearly poised for significant growth, but only if the Long Tail of advertisers and publishers can get on board. They need a roadmap and this is why it’s critical to have a ‘how-to’ white paper at this juncture. The purpose of this hands-on research is to give the inside track on the procedure to set up and measure the results of three mobile campaigns: Google, Decktrade (Millennial Media) and Mo'Jiva. I have chosen to use a small-scale mobile site created by Bango called Mobislim (mobislim.wap.com), which offers a light-hearted look at weight-loss tips. But my investigation into mobile advertising won't stop there. This white paper will be followed shortly by the launch of a dedicated blog at my own site, MSearchGroove. (Marketers who can't wait can follow progress across these and other campaigns as it happens, by visiting the accompanying Mobislim blog (mobislim.wordpress.com) to see the three campaigns cited in this white paper. In addition, marketers can try out their own mobile advertising campaigns, directing traffic to the Mobislim mobile site if they don’t have one of their own.)
Enjoy! Peggy Anne Salz Chief Analyst, Publisher MSearchGroove
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1. Mobile for the masses The emergence of empowered consumers, the advance of so-called digital natives – individuals who have grown up with the Internet – and the abundance of applications designed to give consumers more of a say in how they create, access and enjoy content, have transformed publishing and advertising. But it's the addictiveness, pervasiveness and sheer dominance of the mobile device that gives it a pivotal position in our daily lives. Everything we can do on the Internet with our PCs, we can also do on our mobile phones. What's more, the phenomenal popularity of location-based services, made-for-mobile social networks such as itsmy.com and BuzzCity's myGamma, and a host of schemes that encourage moblogging (mobile blogging) as well as content capture and creation on the fly, pave the way for mobile to be the next – and potentially most dominant – mass media. This is the view of Tomi Ahonen, independent consultant, mobile luminary and author of the newly released book, Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media: Cell phone, Cameraphone, iPhone, smartphone. In this context, Ahonen refers to mobile as the 7th of the mass media, following print from the 1500s, recording from the 1900s, cinema from the 1910s, radio from the 1920s, TV from the 1950s, and Internet from the 1990s. He further concludes that all forms of content will "ultimately converge around the cell phone."
1.1 The next big thing The power of mobile begins with its reach. There are twice as many mobile devices as TV sets, three times as many mobile subscribers as Internet users, and four times as many mobile phones as PCs. Mobile is also very versatile as a media channel if we consider that it is digital, multimedia-capable, personal and interactive. It not only has the ability to deliver broadcast content. A growing number of mobile content companies and network operators are convinced the mobile will be the main device people use to enjoy radio and TV programming anytime, anywhere.
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The capabilities of the mobile phone are uniquely suited to generate massive new mobile advertising opportunities: Everyone has them (high volume) Everyone carries them around (always on, always connected) Everyone can use their user input mechanisms to interact with brands/publishers (camera phones/SMS text/voice) Everyone can use them to pay for content and services (a built-in payment mechanism)
Indeed, mobile can replicate everything that all previous six mass media can do. It's what Ahonen tells me will make mobile "at least as disruptive as the Internet has been so far." People can consume newspapers, read magazine articles and books, listen to podcasts and radio, buy songs and video games and even watch whole movies on their mobile phone.
It's clear mobile will also be the primary way brands and publishers engage with us – on our terms – to deliver their marketing message.
1.2 Advertising is content In his July column in Technology Weekly, Andrew Bud, Executive Chairman of mBlox, a company that operates a major mobile transaction network, summed up the potential of the mobile advertising market simply and succinctly. The market value is "over-estimated in the short term and under-estimated in the long term." Granted there are issues – such as device and operating systems fragmentation, confusion in the emerging value chain, pricing, and a lack of sufficient inventory (issues well outside the scope of this white paper) – which could seriously slow the growth of mobile advertising. (In fact, these disconnects are expertly examined and discussed by Chetan Sharma and his colleagues Joe Herzog and Victor Melfi in their milestone book Mobile Advertising: Supercharge Your Brand in the Exploding Wireless Market.)
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Despite these disconnects, there is a significant increase in the number of mobile advertising success stories documented on a daily basis on news sites such as MobiAdNews and Mobile Marketer Daily. Brands are getting on board – but that is only one driver. We'll likely see an increase in the number of mobile campaigns as more mobile services (such as mobile voice/text and data plans) are increasingly subsidized by mobile advertising. Virgin Mobile's Sugar Mama service offers mobile users extra voice minutes in exchange for viewing targeted mobile advertising. South Africa's Vodacom uses advertising to subsidize mobile data services for much of its pre-paid customer base. Australian MVNO ComTel Corporation, Ltd. has launched SMSPup Mobile, the country’s first advertising subsidized mobile phone service.
Hidden meaning It may seem that mobile advertising and mobile marketing are two interchangeable terms that refer to the same thing. However, there are fundamental differences. The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) defines mobile marketing as “the use of wireless media as an integrated content delivery and direct response vehicle within a cross-media or stand-alone marketing communications program.” Mobile advertising, a subset of mobile marketing, is also a way to deliver a marketing message, but the focus is much more on achieving – and measuring – concrete results. Mobile ads features and formats include banner ads, SMS/MMS ads, full screen interstitials that appear while a requested mobile Web page loads, as well as paid search advertising (associated with keywords).
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Advertising is results
Blyk breaks the mould
Mobile advertising is an effective vehicle to reach and engage with people – and the click-through rates literally speak volumes.
The world’s first ad-funded MVNO marked its one year anniversary in late September. The Finland-based company broke on the scene in the U.K. last year, offering 16 to 24 year-
People try to make this comparison
olds 217 free text messages and 43
between online and mobile and if
call minutes a month in return for
you look at the click-through rates you tend
accepting up to six advertising messages per day. Since then the
to get from an online banner it’s microscopic. It's .02 percent, it’s .05 percent. If you look at mobile advertising, you’re seeing 1-3 percent click-through
model has gained serious traction, and some 100 advertisers, including major brands such as Coca-Cola, L’Oreal and Sky, are lining up to push
rates as an industry standard.
advertising messages to youths who
Aaron Watkins VP of Mobile Integration The Hyperfactory
have expressed an interest in hearing what the brands have to say. Blyk counts over 1,000 campaigns to date,
Mobile ads deliver high click rates
and reports an average response rate
averaging above 1 percent, plus
of 25 percent (!) No doubt this
high conversions rates – 5x better than
success is linked to Blyk's bleeding-
online advertising for some products and
edge approach to mobile advertising
services.
(no spam – no way) and customer profiling (drilling down to deliver the
Eric Eller Senior VP Marketing Millennial Media
right ad to the right person), but it should stand as an example of what a well executed mobile advertising campaign can deliver.
Mobile ad click-through rates fluctuate from 2 percent to 20 percent. But they are consistently higher than online. Mobile is also vastly more effective, in part because the lack of clutter. One banner ad per mobile Web page is more engaging than the dozens that crowd the average Internet website. In fact, one of Nokia's advertisers reports ads on mobile are outperforming Web ads by eight times. Diana LaGattuta Global marketing Nokia Interactive
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We know that click-through rates on mobile ad campaigns are substantially higher than they are online. Put another way, results can peg the needle – but how do we get there from here? Develop campaigns that match our target audience. (Even better if we integrate some element of contextual relevancy, but let's learn to walk before we try to run at this point .) Offer some form of immediate gratification, such as a free download, the chance to take a free quiz or just the freedom to express an opinion. (Blyk has had tremendous success with campaigns that combine SMS and MMS messages to start a conversation with the consumer – in the form of a yes/no question - and then clinch the deal with a strong creative.) Think mobile and personal.
Advertising is connection Finally, mobile is the way to connect with the next billion and the growing middle-class of consumers in Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC countries), for whom the mobile is the first and only interactive screen. As John du Pre Gauntt, eMarketer Senior Analyst and author of the mobile advertising report, Mobile Advertising: After the Growing Pains, points out: "Marketers who do not meet these new customers on their increasingly mobile terms will be displaced by those who do." The stakes are high and so is the pay-off. Euromonitor estimates the size of the middle-class in BRIC countries (people with yearly incomes over $3,000) will have doubled between 2006 and 2009. And this doesn't count the millions of people joining the middle-classes in Latin America, South Africa, and Eastern Europe. There's a world of opportunity. But we miss out if we can't identify and target the countries where browsing the mobile Web is popular among consumers. Even better if we can monitor activity across countries in real-time and factor it into our evolving mobile advertising
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strategies. In a global mobile industry information is indeed a form of power and being able to pick up on consumer tastes and trends early, particularly in emerging and developing markets, can mean the difference between success and failure of a campaign.
Advertising is most effective where consumers are most receptive.
To help us identify where the action is and target countries where Web browsing activity is highest – Bango, a provider of real-time mobile analytics and mobile billing services, publishes analysis on the top countries browsing the mobile Web, as well as the countries that lead the pack in buying mobile services and content. Bango has visibility in what over 20 And the numbers speak volumes – literally.
million users browsed and bought on the mobile Web during the past year. How does it know this? Bango's technology allows it to assign a unique user ID based on information Bango gathers from browser analysis, session information and its long-established billing relationships with mobile operators. This unique user ID – often referred to as a digital fingerprint – enables Bango to distinguish between new and repeat users and therefore quantify precisely the number of unique visitors to a given mobile website.
This pie chart shows that the bulk of mobile browsing is actually coming from countries such as the U.K., the U.S. and India. In comparison, browsing activity across countries including South Africa, Indonesia, Spain and Turkey reaches only the single digits. (Ironically, our assumptions about the booming BRIC markets are not borne out by the hard data. So far only one of the BRIC countries - India - appears in the Top 10 as reported by Bango, and Brazil hovers around at 12th position.)
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If you want to see the mobile Web in action, then check out Bango's live feed – the only one of its kind - which shows content being browsed and bought across over 180 countries and 350 mobile networks – at www.bango.com/live
AdMob, a mobile marketplace offering mobile advertising and analytics solutions, provides a regular snapshot of the data it collects from its vantage point in the ecosystem. By way of background, AdMob sees ad requests from 5,000+ publishers’ sites in over 160 countries, and analyzes the data to produce the AdMob Mobile Metrics Report covering manufacturer, device and country-specific data on AdMob's top six markets by impressions served: U.S., U.K., India, Indonesia, South Africa, and the Philippines. The August 2008 AdMob Mobile Metrics Report, gives us a look at traffic since it launched the report in September 2007. It tells us that Asia leads the pack for ad requests and traffic growth (although the company tells me this may also be attributed in part to a few key publisher deals and increased AdMob activities in the region).
Again, the BRIC countries figure in the results, but the real news is continued growth in maturing mobile markets such as North America and Western Europe.
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AdMob served over 3.6 billion ads in August 2008 and the AdMob AdMonitor provides a small sample of these ad requests in real-time. You can check it out at www.admob.com/s/home/live
How big is the mobile advertising opportunity? The jury is out on this one. But, as in the early days of all mega-trends, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Fortunately, these forecasts agree on one thing: the outlook is positive and dipping a toe in the water is a great way to ride the wave. Emarketer forecasts that worldwide mobile marketing and advertising will reach $19 billion by 2012. Gartner estimates the worldwide mobile advertising market will be worth more than $12 billion by 2011. The Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) expects the U.S. market for adfunded mobile entertainment will grow to $336.35 million by 2013. ABI Research reckons the global mobile marketing industry was worth $1.8 billion in 2007 and is expected to grow to $24 billion by 2013.
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2. The great experiment The purpose of this section is to provide helpful hints and tips on running mobile advertising campaigns. Section 3 will analyze the results of three real campaigns based on three days of data.
Methodology: Three campaigns advertising a free download (a chart of daily activities and the amount of calories they burn). (See image right.) Each campaign had a daily budget of $15 (GBP10) and a bid per click of $0.15 (GBP0.10). Each campaign targeted the U.S. and the U.K. – no limitation on handset types, screen sizes or mobile operator network. (There is an option across the ad networks I tested that allows you to target ads to specific
Mobislim campaigns landing page
handsets or networks, but I'll reserve that for future campaigns. Keep in mind Google allows you to target specific operators but not handsets; Decktrade allows you to do both, as does Mo'Jiva.)
Ad networks: Chosen at random to provide an even spread of size and scope. Google – Synonymous with paid search advertising Decktrade from Millennial Media – A display ad network that served close to 3 billion impressions per month in August. Mo’Jiva – A smaller ad network that opened for business in May 2008. Since then the company claims (in a June press release) to have reached a "milestone of serving more than 70 million ads and holding over 120 million in advertising inventory in the sixty days after launching its services." To be clear, there are many other ad networks and my investigation of mobile advertising will broaden over time to include many of these as well.
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Large ad network Online set-up Global Caters for a range of budgets
Medium ad network Online set-up Global Strong presence in social networking sites Caters for a range of budgets
Medium ad network Online set-up Global Provides adult advertising inventory
Medium ad network Apply online Global Strong US presence
Small ad network Online set-up Asia pacific & South Africa Strong presence in India
Medium ad network Apply online Global (predominantly Europe & US focused) Strong presence in social networking
Medium ad network Apply online Global
Small ad network Online set-up Global Strong presence in India
Large ad network Online set-up Global Caters for a range of budgets
Large search ad network Online set-up Global Caters for a range of budgets
Medium search ad network Apply online Global Caters for a range of budgets
Large search ad network Easily set up by contacting MCN Global Caters for a range of budgets
Medium ad network Online set-up Global Caters for a range of budgets
Medium search and display ad network Online set-up Global Strong US carrier presence
Large search ad network Apply online Global Display and search advertising
For a comprehensive and up to date list of mobile advertising providers, visit the Mobislim blog www.mobislim.wordpress.com
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Mobile analytics: I chose Bango and AdMob as two best examples of analytics packages on the market today. In the campaigns below, I also show the procedure for inserting the campaign tracking code. In brief:
Bango – Pretty straightforward. Sign up for a mobile analytics account, and get your individual tracking number. This unique tracking link - which points to the URL of your choice – essentially follows and records user interaction with a particular landing page, event, campaign or conversion. It's your call, and the procedure doesn't change – no matter what.
AdMob – Slightly more involved. Mobile analytics allows you to track a specific page and features step-by-step instructions you can follow to obtain a tracking link. But it can be tricky.
In my case, because my campaign URL already contained a "?", it was a matter of trial and error to get the click-through URL up and running. News to me: The standard procedure for passing values within the URL - such as the name of my campaign – requires me to know that these values should be separated with &. However, a "?" in my URL and in the piece of code AdMob asked me to tack onto my URL, stopped this process short. To complicate matters, an issue in the original code provided by AdMob, and which I added to my mobislim site (this is a procedure AdMob requires as a rule), was revealed to have a deeper flaw that effectively caused it to ignore the very value I wanted to track. Fortunately, teams at AdMob and Bango found a solution and it's back to business as usual .
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Again, there are other offers on the market and my research will broaden to include them over time. However, some solutions (such as Amethon) cater to large publishers and brands and not the Long Tail of advertisers and publishers, so choose your analytics package to match your needs. www.analytics.admob.com
www.amethon.com
Mobile only analytics from this
Packet sniffing solution that
ad network.
requires its own servers.
www.bango.com/analytics Mobile only analytics, hosted service.
www.google.com/analytics World’s most popular PC web analytics tool tracks smartphones.
www.mobilytics.net
www.nedstat.com
Mobile only analytics, hosted
Enterprise-level web analytics
service.
tool, has mobile handset detection.
www.omniture.com
www.quattrowireless.com
Enterprise-level web analytics
Mobile only analytics from this
tool, has mobile handset
ad network.
detection. www.wapalizer.com Mobile only analytics, hosted service.
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2.1
Ready to rumble
You have your campaign worked out and you're ready to go…
Google: Sign up for a Google account and set up your campaign. The process is a no-brainer and quite straightforward. Scroll down the page and follow the steps, choosing a name for the campaign. (My advice: Pick an ad group title that includes enough information about the campaign for you to identify and track it later. When you get to the point that you have several campaigns going at once, it can get confusing.)
Choose the geography and target consumers by location. Unsurprisingly, tight integration with Google Maps makes picking and visualizing the countries where this campaign will run a breeze.
Choose the ad type and the creative for it. Google provides a choice of ad types. You can choose to create an image ad, a local business ad, a mobile ad, and a click-to-play video ad. In this test, I choose a mobile ad.
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Click on the options that match your advertising goals. More choice. I have the option click-to-call (perfect for local businesses who want to connect with consumers on the fly), and I can target consumers by mobile operator network.
Insert Display and Destination URLs. If you use your own mobile site, as I have, then input your URL in the field marked Display URL. (Note: This URL can be your home page or a specific landing page, depending on what you wish to advertise and measure. In my case, I want to direct traffic to the page in the Mobislim site offering a free download of calorie-burning daily activities.) The Destination URL is where you would insert your tracking link – if you have chosen to use an analytics offer such as Bango or AdMob. You can also use Google Adwords Analytics. But be aware that they give you visibility into click-through rates, spending, and keyword performance. If you want to see conversion rates against goals (for a specific campaign) or would like to know more about your customers (their mobile operators or devices, for example), Google falls short. Note: Google offers the option to choose the mobile operator network (but not the handset) earlier on in the process. However, since I didn't want to limit my campaign to a specific operator, I chose to ignore this option. (To be clear: I do want to know which mobile operators are delivering the most traffic to my site, but that's information Google Adwords Analytics cannot yet provide).
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Select your keywords for your ad campaign. Need some inspiration? (I did!) Google's keyword tool help you find relevant keywords. Note: According to Wikipedia, the term keyword in reference to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) usually refers to a word or keyword phrase (combination of words) used to find relevant and useful web pages. In this case, it triggers the delivery of my ad.
Set your budget. Some networks set a minimum daily budget. With Google this is not a requirement. Review and save your ad campaign.
The procedure for setting up campaigns in Decktrade and Mo’Jiva is similar in many respects (they ask you to choose options and require you to input your Display and Destination URLs, for example.) It's great to see some uniformity, so rather than repeat the obvious, my analysis will focus on what is different and what you need to know.
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Decktrade: Sign in and set up your campaign. Decktrade lets you choose a product category and target specific countries, carriers and handsets. Once you've saved the name of the campaign and the Destination URL, you can move to the dashboard, where you can set up your bids, creatives, and channels. Select your channel(s). The channels are helpful, self-explanatory categories, but choosing one for my weightloss chart was tough. Likewise, I found myself wishing I could see the list of publishers grouped under each category.
It's about community, but it has little to do with social networking, sharing and all the other concepts that are grouped under this channel. I am offering a download, but I don't want my ad to show alongside offers for ringtones and wallpapers. That stretches the relevancy of my placement to the max. Entertainment. Hardly. News and information. Sort of – but not in the same league as many of the content providers/advertisers sure to be found here. Portals. Maybe. To be clear, Decktrade does explain these categories in detail on the site, but what to do when your content – like mine – doesn't fall neatly into one or even a few categories? My take: It's early days and this is one of those minor details ad networks across the board will work out as more publishers and advertisers get involved, bringing a greater variety of content with them.
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Select your budget. You can set your daily budget – there are no limits in either direction.
Select image or text. Decktrade is a display ad network, so there is a lot of flexibility around building and choosing your creative. (To be consistent with my other campaigns, I kept mine to a text banner.)
Review and send your campaign for approval.
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Mo’Jiva:
Create the campaign. A simple 6-step procedure to follow. Start off by inputting the tracking link in the space asking for the site URL you wish to advertise. Move on to the next step.
Targeting keywords Keywords are not an option. For some reason, "diet" the keyword most relevant to my weight-loss campaign, isn't on the money. By the looks of it neither is my campaign since it would only show across 171 sites and 574 pages… … To increase my reach I opt for one of Mo'Jiva's predefined channels. But will it come at the expense of relevancy? It's a conscious choice I make but I have to ask myself: Am I advertising where users will appreciate my message? Or will they be annoyed?
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Choose bids Interestingly, the minimum bid is pre-defined and rather pricey. I stick to my budget. A plus in my book: You have the option to run a Pay per view campaign.
Choose schedule Pick dates and times (I chose to ignore this option in my campaigns).
Review your campaign and send for approval. This generally takes one working day.
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3. Analytics Mobile is not PC. It may sound like a bit of a no-brainer, but the business implications are profound. For publishers and advertisers it changes all the rules. As Jonathan MacDonald, Senior Consultant Mobile Marketing at OgilvyOne Worldwide, a company focused on customer management and interactive marketing, correctly points out both at industry conferences and in his upcoming mobile advertising book, The Communication Ideal: It's time for a rethink. Mobile advertising isn't just about banners; it's about coordinating and cultivating two-way conversations with individuals and giving them a say in their advertising experiences. Think co-creation. Think communication. A full examination of the seismic shift in what mobile advertising is and is not is outside the scope of this white paper. For that, I suggest you follow coverage and guest columns at MSearchGroove and its network of partner sites.
Two constants you can count on: Retrofitting online campaigns for mobile is a flawed approach. No need to wait until whiz-bang technologies come online to deliver our advertising message. We can harness simple SMS and MMS formats, and we can drive positive results. (See Blyk breaks the mould, page 5.)
As I said, mobile is not PC. At a practical level, the fundamental differences between these mass media demand us to rethink how we measure the success of our campaigns, or the degree of their failure.
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Analytics on a PC revolves around the existence of embedded JavaScript code in the pages of a website. That works a treat on PCs because the majority of browsers support JavaScript. Mobile devices fail to support JavaScript sufficiently, so it’s not a reliable tracking mechanism. The same goes for cookies. They do work on some mobile browsers, but in the majority of cases they get lost, jumbled or removed when the user moves from one site to another. Again, not a reliable mechanism. Referral information, information that can indicate where the user has come from and recount the journey from Page A to Page B and so on, is also not reliable. Sure, smartphones are starting to pass information, but it’s not enough to understand precisely who is visiting a site and how they got there. Finally, the last resort, looking up the IP address, doesn’t work either as the process identifies the IP address of the mobile operator’s mobile gateway, and not the individual devices running on it.
3.1 The measure of success In this section, I examine the breadth and depth of campaign analysis offered by two solutions: AdMob Mobile Analytics and Bango Mobile Analytics. The aim here is not to compare how well my three campaigns performed. For that I would also need to acknowledge and address a laundry list of do's and don'ts around Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
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At the other end of the spectrum, poor performance could be my fault alone and linked to the campaign
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is
concept itself. (After all, offering a free download
defined by Wikipedia as a "form of
chart of calorie-burning daily activities may not be a
Internet marketing that seeks to
crowd-pleaser.)
promote websites by increasing their
Against this backdrop, I have made the conscious
visibility in search engine result
decision to note the features and functionalities of the
pages."
mobile analytics solutions (provided by AdMob and Bango) that provide me with answers to three of the all-important 5Ws every advertiser and publisher
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
needs to know: Who (are my customers)? What (did
is the process of editing and
they look at)? Where (did they come from)?
organizing the content on a webpage or across a website to increase its potential relevance to specific
You run a campaign to
keywords on specific search engines,
increase mindshare or market share
with the aim of achieving a higher
– or both. Tracking your results with a
organic search listing and thus
mobile analytics solution is the only
increasing the volume of targeted
reliable way to know if you are on the
traffic from search engines.
money – or wasting it.
3.2 Seeing is believing… Become familiar with the analytics solutions you implement and check them often. Making this part of your regular routine is essential to understanding your customers and refining your campaigns to achieve high performance. For the purpose of this white paper, I have chosen to review the results for my campaign (outlined in Section 2, page 10) for the period October 1 – October 3. (By way of background, the Mo'Jiva campaign was approved to run on October 1, but didn't. The cause: A combination of email overlap and a mix-up in the approval process – both harmless glitches that are no reflection on Mo'Jiva's management or professionalism. Rather
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than re–set the campaigns to start on October 3 and conclude on October 6, I opted to take the data from an identical test campaign I ran with Mo'Jiva a week before. Since I am examining the level of visibility AdMob and Bango provide me into the data – and not the performance of individual campaigns – this substitution does not impact my analysis or conflict with my methodology. )
Dashboards
AdMob and Bango dashboards both offer a wealth of information on customers. So how often do they update the analytics to provide me insight into just how well (or badly) my campaign is doing? AdMob analytics are updated daily – and the dashboard reporting is updated periodically. In comparison, Bango analytics are strictly realtime. What you see is what you get (got) – at that moment in time. Both solutions drill down into the results, features and functionalities I explore in the following screenshots.
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Tracking links Inserting tracking links allows me to see the click-throughs to my URLs. Both solutions allow me to compare ad networks and provide me a menu of options to drill down even further in the data. In the AdMob example, my focus is on the campaigns I have marked with a "". The dashboard shows me the number of visits. AdMob also shows me the average time spent on my campaign landing page. I have 21 visits to my Google campaign (octgoogle). Bango shows me the results for each campaign according to the Bango tracking number it was assigned by the system. I see that my Google campaign – titled October GOOGLE – had 18 page views. Bango also provides me with more information about this traffic in later screenshots.
(As I explained earlier in this section – the Mo'Jiva campaign in Bango started later, so I opted to use earlier data referring to an identical campaign titled October Mo'Jiva.)
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If you want to deep dive into my campaigns and what they achieved, then check out all the Mobislim campaigns as reported by Bango at mobislim.wordpress.com. AdMob does not yet have a mobile site you can road test for this purpose, so I will post the screenshots that illustrate the other two campaigns on my dedicated blog.
Campaign summary Now that I know how my campaigns did on the whole, I decide to analyze the results of my campaigns on an individual basis. For the purposes of this white paper (and so not to overwhelm you with pages of screenshots for three campaigns as reported by two mobile analytics solutions ), I have chosen to document the campaign I ran on Google only.
AdMob provides a drop-down menu to let me zero in on my Google campaign. Additional options (shown in grey under "Visits") provide me more information about this single campaign (or event), such as unique visitors, the level of engagement, where the traffic originates, which operators drive it, and specific device details.
Likewise, Bango allows me to focus exclusively on my Google campaign. It provides me with a handy at-aglance summary of what the numbers mean. Beneath this a menu of horizontal tabs walk me through unique visitors, where the traffic originates, which operators drive it, and specific device details. On the whole similar, but there are a few key differences as the screenshots below clearly illustrate. 26
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Unique visitors AdMob provides analysis of unique visitors based on 17.42% of site traffic. While the above screenshot documents that AdMob can provide me analysis of the total visits to my Google campaign, it's clear that AdMob cannot show me the details associated with the unique visitors to my campaign in real-time. How are unique visitors calculated based on a sample of traffic to my landing page? A box above the fold (pointed out by my blue arrow) clearly explains this procedure. Bango shows the number of unique visitors for each day of my three-day campaign. It also provides visibility into these same unique visitors by operator, by device, and by country.
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Operators, devices and geographies
AdMob and Bango analytics solutions provide comparable visibility into these areas. Rather than include a screenshot of each feature for each of the solutions, I have chosen to provide two screenshots that provide a good overview.
A surprise: I set up campaigns to run in the U.S. and the U.K., yet Bango reveals I am literally getting results from more countries than I bargained for. (Remember I pay for these clicks.) My Google campaign is getting traffic from three countries. My Decktrade campaign tops that, and reports users in six (!) countries are clicking on my ad. To drive the point home, I have chosen to show you a screenshot from my Decktrade campaign instead of the Google campaign just this once. My take: It's great that people everywhere are using the mobile Web, but it's clear that ad networks will have to develop more controls moving forward to ensure that customers clicking through on my ad are indeed based in the countries I target. It's early days, but I'm optimistic we'll get there.
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Drilling deeper AdMob gives me an overview of visitor engagement as measured by the average length of the visit, the depth of the visit (how many pages viewed), loyalty (a term it does not fully define), and visit interval. It's useful information based on what AdMob gleans from analyzing a percentage sample of my traffic and refreshing this periodically. A closer look at the length of time spent on my site, for example, reveals visits last between 0 and 10 seconds. (Hardly a surprise since I'm only offering a free download chart. Not much to read let alone engage with there.) Bango doesn't offer approximate information on engagement. But it does offer a breakdown of all unique visitors – and all in real-time. Put simply, Bango has the technology to assign each user a kind of digital fingerprint, what Bango calls the user ID, allowing it to record what individual users browse and buy as it happens. (This is explained in detail on page 7.)
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The number of unique visitors or the level of engagement? What matters most depends on your campaign objectives.
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And deeper AdMob tells me the top 10 keywords by visits, useful feedback that will no doubt allow me to fine-tune future campaigns to emphasize the terms AdMob reckons are the most popular. I have an issue with free porn being connected in any way with my free download chart, but that's no reflection on AdMob. It is an indication that one of my chosen ad networks doesn't take relevance as seriously I had hoped when it comes to placing my ad where customers will expect and appreciate it. Hmmm…A confirmation in my book that better targeting must become a business imperative moving forward. Otherwise, my ads will be seen and treated as spam.
Bango features a Revenue overview section, showing me how many customers got past my pitch to actually do something that made me money. (I didn't charge for content in my campaign but if I had, then this Bango feature could give me real-time visibility into my sales.) If you plan to charge for content, then a Bango tracking link will provide you visibility into revenue and conversion rates for each campaign/event, revealing how many customers clicked through to the payment page of your website, how many actually bought the content, and how much they spent. Invaluable information for any publisher of content.
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4 Conclusion Now that we've covered the basics of mobile advertising (setting up campaigns) and mobile analytics (measuring results), I invite you to try both out for yourself. You'll soon see how simple it is. If you don't have a mobile website, then test the waters by setting up a campaign (as I did) using the small-scale mobile site created by Bango called Mobislim (mobislim.wap.com). And remember: You can follow progress across the campaigns documented in this white paper – as well as a slew of campaigns in the pipeline – by visiting my own dedicated blog soon to launch at MSearchGroove. You can also check out coverage at the accompanying Mobislim blog (mobislim.wordpress.com), authored by my esteemed colleague Maria Sanchez. (Full disclosure here: Maria is a Bango marketing manager. She also calls them as she sees them. ) Her keen observations and good-natured rants, which she posts regularly on the Mobislim blog, are a perfect complement to my in-depth analysis and user-friendly clarification of the range of mobile advertising and mobile analytics tools and techniques at your disposal. Whatever site you choose to read, I hope you'll continue to experiment and learn. Mobile advertising is a brave new space with new rules and new rewards. As publishers and advertisers, we should be conscious that our efforts to achieve our business objectives can be compared to a marathon with no finish line. Success is a journey, not a destination. Great to have you along for the ride!
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This paper is sponsored by Bango
About Bango Bango is a leading provider of real-time mobile analytics for website owners, marketing agencies and advertisers. Our hosted service allows businesses worldwide to independently measure the importance and success of mobile marketing, allowing them to establish the strongest personal relationships with their customers through any mobile phone (mass market and smartphones). Bango delivers the benefits of traditional Web analytics to the fast growing mobile world, providing familiar metrics like unique visitors alongside new mobile metrics like geo-location by country, operator identification (including virtual networks) and handset information (make, model, features). Bango is a mobile Web pioneer and in addition to providing mobile analytics solutions, the company has over 7 years experience in mobile billing. Bango's customers use Bango's payments network to collect payments in over 150 countries worldwide and put the charge on the consumer's on their phone bill, credit/debit card or PayPal account. Read more at www.bango.com
The opinions expressed in this white paper are those of Peggy Anne Salz and MSearchGroove and do not reflect the opinions of the organizations referenced in this paper.
About Peggy Anne Salz Peggy Anne Salz is the chief analyst and publisher of MSearchGroove, an online source of analysis and commentary on mobile search, mobile advertising and social media. Her report, Mobile Search & Content Discovery – the first of its kind – establishes Peggy as an authority on mobile search and content discovery technologies enabling media companies and mobile operators to monetize content and services. Her drive to spark debate about issues impacting the industry at all levels has won her international recognition as a brave new voice in the mobile content market. She has established a successful consulting career based on vision, insight, versatility, and over 15 years of industry experience.
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About MSearchGroove MSearchGroove.com provides analysis and commentary on mobile search, mobile advertising and social media. Through primary research and interviews with c-level executives and industry luminaries, MSG is the essential read for companies seeking ways to monetize their digital assets, drive mobile advertising revenues and harness the power of empowered consumers.
Special thanks to Tom Thurston Tom is the creator of mobislim.wap.com mobile site. Tom is a Java programmer who discovered the mobile internet in 2004 and has been building mobile systems ever since. Tom has worked with the likes of Disney and Reuters to provide on and off deck mobile internet sites, has contributed to the Volantis mobile products used by mobile operators such as Orange, Three and Turkcell, has architected and developed industry leading mobile entertainment sites on the O2 portal and has created the Bango enabled content delivery platform used to sell mobile assets for almost every football club in the UK. For more info see themobiledeveloper.com
© Bango.net 2008
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