I’m settled in and super-charged after the Mobile Search Masterclass, and a string of meetings and meet-ups, including AD:SAUCE, a must-attend monthly networking event that brings together the stakeholders and shareholders – from media professionals and practitioners to publishers to sales executives – that must connect to take advertising (across all platforms) to the next level.

Company pitches and pre-packaged “debate”? Not at AD:SAUCE. This event stripped away the hype to hone in on what really matters: the end-user experience. The next AD:SAUCE will focus on mobile. If you can make the trip then I suggest you do. I am determined to attend regularly, despite the “commute” (I live about 30 miles away from Cologne). My sincere thanks to Jonathan MacDonald for bringing the event to my attention, inviting me for a pint and a mind-meld, and for introducing me to some super-cool companies I will showcase on MSG and ASE (AltSearchEngines) in the next weeks.

Ironically, the need to measure campaign performance and rate results ran like a leitmotif through both the AD:SAUCE evening and the Mobile Search Masterclass. (A hot topic during breaks was SEO, and the mission-critical importance of mobile analytics.) The increasing and pivotal importance of mobile analytics is further driven home by Bango, which has taken the wraps off of a new site analysis capability that is now finally and formally a part of the latest release Bango Analytics.

A complement to Bango’s campaign analysis – which the company released in February – the new site analysis technology lets website owners accurately count the number of unique visitors browsing their site. Put the two together – as Bango has – and you have a package that provides website owners the two metrics they themselves have said they need most: the number of unique visitors (site mobile analytics) and conversion rates from mobile marketing campaigns.

Bango recently surveyed 550 mobile website owners, and a whopping 80 percent reported being able to measure the daily/weekly/monthly number of unique visitors to their mobile website was key. Conversion rates/effectiveness were important for 71 percent; for 58 percent responded measuring new/repeat visitors was important; for 54 percent, information about the handsets their visitors use was important; for 50 percent location was important; and for 41 percent knowing the mobile network used by visitors to the mobile site was important.

We know the metrics matter, but should we care about Bango’s newest offer?

Before I took off for London I had a pre-briefing with Andy Bovingdon, Bango VP Product Marketing, to connect the dots, address some criticisms and discuss what’s next.

NUTS & BOLTS: The campaign analytics capability, which is covered in-depth in this MSG post, allows marketers/site owners to better understand and measure their marketing campaigns. It harnesses Bango’s ability to create and track the unique user ID, a kind of digital fingerprint. Put simply, for each individual that clicks on an ad or browses a site, a privacy protected Bango User ID is created (this is the sum total of insight, information and data compiled through WAP gateway profiling; data from browser analysis; session information; and network interactions). This unique user ID enables Bango to distinguish between new and repeat users, allowing it to quantify the number of unique visitors for a given mobile site.

As Andy puts it: “The way it works is the user clicks on the link on the banner ad and, rather than going directly to the landing page, we do a quick bounce off the Bango server. This is very familiar technology in the Web world, and the likes of Double Click and other ad tracking companies use this mechanism. Nothing gets displayed, we just simply use the re-direct to actually track the physical clicks, so we’re not tracking pages being loaded or displayed. We’re tracking the event of someone clicking on the link and then – as soon as possible – getting them to the landing page.”

The site analytics capability, on the other hand, is a line of html code in each page to be tracked – without the need to install anything on the server. (A site summary report provides the site owner with key metrics on the mobile website, including unique visitors.) “Site analysis doesn’t require re-directs. It’s a straightforward process that doesn’t involve the visitors of the site doing anything but browsing the site. We’ve purposely used the best and most familiar mechanism out there, building on the idea of putting a one by one image tag onto the pages you wish to track. However, in classic Bango style, we’ve enhanced the traditional way of doing that by overlaying our unique user ID technology onto that [tag]…. So when the visitor comes through and lands on your home page, the little bit of Bango code is like a little beacon. It is triggered, and tells us that particular page has been viewed.”

ACCURACY: It’s not rocket science. It’s all about taking the familiar tracking technology we know in the Internet and applying it to mobile. The service has been in beta for a few months with about 250 clients. Bango’s technology is integrated into 100,000 sites in 28 countries. The secret sauce is Bango’s unique user ID plus “the secure relationships with numerous carriers, and the information that they provide to us to uniquely identify people.” As a result, Andy says, Bango can “accurately tell if one person has viewed the home page 10 times, or if 10 people have viewed it once.”

KEY DATA: An interesting observation from Andy tells us that targeting handsets and people is not the major focus for mobile website owners. “We expected to see location and handset specific information being higher up in the survey results. Because this is mobile, and mobile means I want to be able to geo-locate right down to the final yard, or I want to understand how many iPhone handsets are out there, it made sense that it would be important for mobile website owners. The reality was that it isn’t so important after all.”

What does that tell us? “The mobile market is growing up.” Mobile website owners are not just interested in cool mobile features and functionality, and the Starbucks example (push ads based on location etc…) is not Nirvana. “Website owners and marketers are interested in solid business results, and they want to understand two key metrics: how successful are they in terms of customer engagement through their campaigns, through their marketing, and through their site design; and secondly, which of the campaigns – which of those channels to market that they’re spending their time and money on – is actually delivering for them.”

COMPETITION: In Andy’s view, it’s not about competing head-on with the AdMobs and Amethons of this world. It’s about providing website owners and marketers choice. (Keeping in mind that it’s free of charge for up to 100,000 page visits per month.) “Anybody can come to the Bango site, sign up for free, grab their little bit of html tracking code, throw it into the destination url or whatever ad network they’re using and find out the facts….Because we use the link re-direction, it means that you can use us as well as the companies that use the less reliable referral information approach for finding out this data. If you really want to see how well your campaigns are working, then cross check it with us.” (With the free Bango offer, users gets 10 tracking URLs.) “We are limiting it to 10 so that we can make sure we can deliver the scalability as we go forward. We’re seeing a lot of demand for it.”

WHAT’S NEXT?: Look for more fine-tuning and a sharper focus on benchmarking. “In terms of the tools we provide, it’s all about providing [data/details on] web page traffic and optimization of the site.” Moving forward, Bango may dip into that stockpile of data to develop “the benchmarking side of things.” As Andy puts it: “We’ve got some good data, we know what the basic picture is, and we can provide a good feedback loop.”Andy and I mused that Bango could also bring its talents to the buy-side of the equation. “I think a [service] where you [website owners/marketers] could have the ability and the control to say here’s the rules I want to apply, here’s the targeting, here’s the scope for the ads, now go and fill in the blank is an interesting proposition. I think there’s something good behind having an independent ability to do that.” And so do I Andy! Let’s just say, watch this space for Bango or another company to hopefully streamline this soon.

MY TAKE: The offer brings together campaign analysis capability and site analysis capability in one offer, which is also the essence of Bango’s value proposition. Bango claims it is an industry-first. I’ve since made some calls and likewise can’t identify a vendor or offer that provides these two metrics in one mobile analytics package. (If you know of one, then please let me know. I’ll report on the Bango offer and results in August when I visit the company HQ in Cambridge to road test the analytics on a mobile site.)

(Disclaimer: Bango is an MSG supporter.)

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Local Search, Location-based services, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Research. 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.