Mobile analytics is a hot topic for companies seeking to innovate in a new channel for their products, extend their brand, and expose content and advertising to a wider audience.
Several Web
analytics vendors offer mobile measurement capabilities mixed into their current offerings. Some even offer mobile specific reporting. A few companies provide specific solutions for mobile analytics
as part of their ad networks, content delivery and transactional processing systems, marketing and barcoding services, and even as infrastructure or network appliances. Even audience measurement
companies have entered this space, primarily through acquisition.
For the most part, when people refer to "mobile analytics" they are referring to collecting behavior about "mobile browser"
activity across a variety of handsets. Very few companies offer the ability to track behavior in non-browser-based mobile applications.
Measurement challenges in this area include:
Data collection. Not all mobile browsers execute JavaScript, so the most common method for collecting analytics data doesn't work across all devices. Thus, vendors
offer us choices for data collection. Current mobile analytics offerings include image-based data collection methods, packet sniffers, server-side "no tag" implementations, and log files. Unique visitor identification due to lack of cookie support and the changing of IP addresses. IP addresses on mobile browsers can change as they switch from tower to
tower. In addition, many mobile devices will take the IP address of the gateway, making all the devices look the same "person." Compounding the difficulty in assessing "uniqueness"
is that not all mobile devices support cookies. As many of you know, in Web analytics, cookies are helpful in defining uniqueness, and in mobile analytics are helpful in weaving together sessions
when the IP address changes mid-session. The fallback method in analytics, when you can't use a cookie, is IP address/user agent. Thus, if you can't set cookies and the IP address and user agents
are identical, then how do you identify uniqueness? That's the challenge. Interestingly, packet sniffing as a data collection method has an advantage here because some devices pass unique IDs (such
as the phone number) in the HTTP header. When you can detect a unique value in the header, you can easily detect uniqueness.
Handset capability detection.
Companies that want to identify whether the device supports WAP pushing, streaming video, ringtones, downloading video clips, and so on need to carefully select a measurement tool in order to ensure
these attributes are available. Phone and manufacturer identification. Databases from WURFL and DeviceAtlas can be used to identify phone and manufacturer device attributes. Larger vendors are further behind on integrating this data into their current
offerings, whereas the smaller niche players are making use of it. Screen resolution detection. The Mobile Marketing Association' s standards for the four "standard" screen sizes may carry enough weight to push this
disdained piece of metrics trivia available from JavaScript based tagging in web analytics into a brighter spotlight for guiding user experience and interface design for mobile applications.
Traffic source detection. Determining the source of traffic, such as search, email, direct entry, RSS feeds, and marketing campaigns can be challenging in the mobile space.
Geographic identification. Where are the visitors viewing your site coming from? And what does the mobile audience environment "look like" in each country?
From this information, you can extrapolate country-specifics for mobile site and application optimization and localization. But not all devices enable geographic detection because the gateway's IP
address is used, not a GPS signal. If geo data is important to you, make sure you ask vendors that you are researching how they collect it and what are the limitations. While there are still
many challenges in collecting and reporting mobile analytics data, the industry is much further along than we were last year in delivering solutions in this space. Still there's a lot more work that
vendors need to do to improve the precision of the data they are collecting and the overall data about the mobile experience that they are reporting.
As you look toward purchasing the
best solution for your company's needs, carefully consider the data you need to collect and report for analysis, and judiciously choose the vendor that provides the most appropriate and extensible
data collection and reporting capabilities that fit your business goals.
