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Jason Spero, AdMob VP of marketing, pre-briefed me on the company’s key metrics, data that now makes up a must-read monthly report aptly titled the AdMob Mobile Metrics Report. Why does the company produce the report in the first place? Because the mobile advertising community needs data to plan campaigns and track results. AdMob, in the role of a mobile advertising marketplace provider, serves graphical banner and text links on mobile web pages for more than 2,000 publishers and has served more than 11 billion ads across 160 countries since the company launched in January 2006 (breaking a few records along the way that MSG reported here).

AdMob also stores and analyzes data from every ad request, impression and click and passes it on to publishers, so they can optimize their site performance across handsets, and advertisers, so they can understand demographics and device capabilities. In fact, AdMob this month beefed up its report, adding the top 20 handsets per country. The November report will reveal some data on the iPhone in Europe, so watch this space.

But first, the highlights of this month’s report:

I asked Jason for his take on the highlights, a lively conversation that turned into an impromptu Q&A. Here is an excerpt of what we discussed on-the-record. (But no worry about missing the rest, Jason has promised MSG will be among the first to break the news…)

Q: It’s tough to identify a meaningful trend based on two months of data, but what stands out?

A: The usage in Europe has grown but we also can’t conclude that usage in the U.S. has slowed. What’s really interesting is the device movement. We can see real movement in devices in our network and some of that, again, is because of changes in the publisher mix. For example, looking at figures for the U.S., Motorola increased its share from 18.7 to 20.5. This could well be at the expense of Research in Motion, as we see its share fell from 18.1 to 15.6 percent. I should add that the Blackberry 8700 and the 8100 both lost some share, but then a couple of the newer models saw some pretty dramatic growth. And then the iPhone is probably the story of the month. And I think the European iPhone will be the story of the month next month.

Q: Speaking of the iPhone, can you update me on your “Ad Lab” and progress in matching advertising to the way consumers interact with individual words on the touch screen?

A: We have used the information that you and I talked about, and the ability to get down to the word within the ad and we’re doing some experiments with some automobile brands right now. We’re trying to understand what adjectives people associate with their automobiles.

The iPhone is growing in volume but it’s a very targeted platform….The iPhone delivers a certain demographic, we’re seeing certain advertisers very eager to advertise on the iPhone, as people, trying to reach early- adopters and people trying to reach higher net-worth individuals.

Q: You’re also now tracking the top 20 devices.

A: That’s right. One of the biggest requests we got was: go deeper than ten devices. And it’s interesting - and pretty consistent across geographies - that the top twenty devices represent plus or minus, fifty percent of the traffic in a particular market. From a content developer’s perspective, they know a lot more about how broadly they need to port their content and apps. If you want to reach 50 percent of the market [this data tells you to] port to these 20 devices.

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• Mobile Advertising

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