In-Brief: Continuing MSG coverage of mobile analytics tools and technologies available to help publishers/advertisers drive (and measure) results. Where does this leave Google, Yahoo & Microsoft? Will this spark new interest in M&A? And what is the state of mobile search in the scheme of things? I explore these and other questions in an exclusive Q&A.

In preparation for last week’s in-depth post on AdMob’s new mobile analytics tool, I also connected with Bango CEO Ray Anderson, who hinted that Bango would also soon announce a new goal comparison feature, allowing marketers to measure the ROI for campaigns across different ad networks.

Bango did indeed release the news this week, and I caught up with Anil Malhotra, Bango SVP Alliances & Marketing, to get more details. In a nutshell, the new goal comparison feature is designed from the ground up to let users see which mobile ad campaigns and traffic sources deliver the best conversion rates. The data provided by Bango allows users to compare the value of traffic from third-party ad services. Bango reports that “some companies have already reported discrepancies approaching 20 percent between traffic they are getting and what they have paid for.”

It’s this gap that Bango aims to fill with this latest feature. (BTW: A survey of the market tells me a goal comparison tool – or one like it – is not currently available in other analytics products. However, if you offer one, or know of one, then please let me know.)

This week’s improvement effectively extends this tracking to tell marketers/advertisers if users reached the goal of a campaign and if they took action (completing a click to call, a content download or a purchase, for example). This shift in focus makes sense if we consider the broader mobile advertising paradigm is moving away from getting clicks to achieving conversion.

Against this backdrop, I predict more activity in the emerging mobile analytics spot. And, if you want a blow-by-blow account, I highly recommend you check out Bryson Meunier’s natural search and mobile SEO blog here.

I caught up with Anil to ask him about the competitive landscape and some likely outcomes. Vendor spin aside, he provides an interesting take on the market and hints that a partnership with one or the other mobile advertising companies is in the works. (I could imagine companies like Millennial Media teaming up with Bango for the vendor-independent analytics, for example.)

By way of background: Bango has found another use for its User ID technology which, like a digital finger print, provides a way for publishers/marketers to track people as they enter a mobile website. (This technology, which Bango originally developed to streamline billing, assigns a unique number to each customer who passes through the system.) The User ID technology reveals important data about the user, such as the network operator they came from and the model handset they used.

An excerpt of our impromptu Q&A:

Q: The mobile analytics market is heating up with new companies and, in the case of Bango, new features. What’s all the excitement about?

A: It’s about measuring the effectiveness – the real value – of the traffic I’m acquiring. Before, it was about creating a landing page and the action was an afterthought. Increasingly, the focus of [the publisher/advertiser model] will be to get a visitor to sign up for something, agree to receive alerts, or click to call. There’s a whole range of options and actions, and the key question [related to a mobile advertising campaign] boils down to: If I pay a pound for every click, then I want to know how many do I convert successfully into performing the action that is the goal of my campaign?

What [Bango] goal comparison does is to take absolute numbers of people responding to an ad or promotion and look at the proportion of those people performing the action as a percentage of the people that clicked. It then compares that figure across each of the channels in which you placed your marketing advertisement. Say you can see that Channel A produced 25 percent more click-thrus [CTRs] than Channel B, and yet the conversion rate through Channel B, albeit for a smaller number of users, was 40 percent higher for some reason. This [goal comparison feature] now makes it possible to see, compare, and have a view of where your money has been most profitably spent. And, since we know the difference between a repeat responder and a unique responder, you have a very clear count of the number of people that performed the action you wanted them to perform.

Q: Why the special emphasis on a vendor-independent solution in your marketing?

A: This matters. People are coming to us and saying: “We want to set up tracking through Bango because I see that you guys don’t have a stake in this particular marketing channel over that particular marketing channel.” Hence the expression ‘vendor-independent’ or ‘vendor-neutral’. The other players are also doing the best job they can, but I suspect there is a feeling that those companies [because they also sell ad inventory] may be inclined to give the best possible shine or gloss to the results they get from their channel versus one of their competitors’ channels.

At Bango, we’re not at all in the game of selling ad inventory so we’re completely detached from any particular marketing or advertising channel. As a result, we deliver a single unified and completely channel neutral perspective on how well your campaigns [across ad networks] are doing.

Q: With all the attention on newcomer mobile analytics companies – such as Mobilytics and Amethon, for example – is there a chance the players will lose site of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft?

A: That’s an interesting question. There are some newbies out there and the space is crowding. I think you’ll find it will shake out, and you’ll see alliances between companies that are very clear about their ambitions to be advertisers, and companies that do the analytics. Likewise, you’ll probably also hear some interesting [news] about this from Bango in the future.

So, to your questions about these enormous powerhouses in the online marketing world. I think there’s probably a mixture of [Google, Yahoo, Microsoft] being not bothered because, as far as they’re concerned, who are these [mobile analytics] companies anyway…

On the other hand, it [these mobile analytics companies] might present Google, Yahoo, Microsoft with an interesting M&A opportunity. The reality probably lies somewhere in the middle. I don’t think they [Google, Yahoo, Microsoft] are completely indifferent to what a company like AdMob is doing, for example. Yahoo’s got mobile ad inventory sales organisations, so has Google. At that level they are competing for ad spend, so Google and Yahoo do care. In fact, Yahoo is taking this pretty seriously. In London, Yahoo has a focused and trained sales force selling ad inventory against AdMob; and Yahoo in the U.S. has a similar thing.

How does Google fit into all this? There is a scenario which says that Google will totally dominate the mobile web advertising and it’s not a scenario that I can say would never come to pass. For the foreseeable future, it’s some way away. After all, you have Microsoft with a footprint, you’ve got Yahoo with a footprint, you’ve got JumpTap with a footprint, and you have Medio with a footprint. It is quite a fragmented marketplace right now. So it seems to be unlikely that one or other of those two giants is going to have such a stranglehold on the mobile advertising spend that you might just as well use their analytics.

Q: Finally, what about the quality of the mobile search experience?

A: There are some difficulties around implementation. The quality of search index for the mobile site is still disappointing. I quite regularly search quite reasonably specific search terms and I know full well that a very well made, purpose built WAP site for that search term exists. Yet it’s not the website you have as part of the search results. Why is that? Why can’t Google and Yahoo index the WAP site properly and send you back the made-for-mobile content when you do a mobile search? Despite the criticism I’ve just made, mobile search has improved quite significantly and quite noticeably over the last 12 months, and over the next 12 months it should get even better.

Disclaimer: Bango is an MSG supporter.

BTW: Where are all the other analytics vendors? Again, my personal invitation to contact me directly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 10:10 am and is filed under Mobile Advertising, Mobile Research, Mobile Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.