Its been a whirlwind past few weeks starting with CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas followed by trips to New York, Washington DC, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
CTIA Wireless was a great experience and I had a chance to talk with lot of companies who are doing great things in mobile. My focus was on content and services that could benefit from our Mobile Analytics solution and there were plenty of those!
The two largest categories were Mobile Social Networking and Mobile Site Builders. Both require analytics to support their business models:
- Social networking sites need to understand how people are using the site and need to provide accurate and relevant metrics to advertisers.
- Site builders need to be able to provide their clients with analytics since client will be unable to implement their own system.
A lot of these companies are now looking for an analytics solution and they were pleased to hear that we had a solution that fits both of these business models. It was surprising that they had gone for so long without an analytics solution but the simple fact is that there has not been a mobile specific package available up until now.
Most companies realised that Google Analytics won't work and have tried analysing log files but soon realised that standard log analysis packages do not take into account the complexities and challenges of measuring mobile browsing activity.
Some companies are gathering relevant usage data within the database but do not have the skills, experience or resources to develop the reporting front end. They typically have a few queries to provide the most obvious metrics but realise the work involved to report on a full suite of analytics.
My other trips within the US were meetings with some of the 'big guys' within the broader online space who are now starting to mobilise their content. It was interesting to see that none of these companies are using mainstream, commercial web analytics solutions, even for their web assets. They have all developed internal tools which they are starting to apply to their mobile content but realise there are differences between web and mobile that will need to be addressed.
