Amethon Insights

Growing mobile traffic

We have recently had a number of conversations with clients that go beyond the normal mobile analytics questions. In particular, they are asking how can they grow their mobile traffic and unique visitors. While this is not exactly our core business, we have seen enough examples across our client base to have a pretty good idea of the various methods and techniques available to the mobile site publisher.

While there are a lot of similarities between growing web and mobile traffic, there are also a number of differences as well as options that don't existing in the web. This post attempts to identify, describe and compare as many as possible to help mobile web site owners determine what is best for their particular situation.

Irrespective of how you try and grow traffic to your mobile site, it is critical that you measure the individual performance of each traffic growth initiative rather than just looking at the top line traffic numbers. This will be covered in more detail at the end of the post but it is worth emphasising right from the start.

Search

While search is the most common way to find standard websites, mobile subscribers do not use search to the same degree as on the web although iPhone users are changing that trend. 

Search can be divided into two main categories:

• Organic search where the search engine ranks search results based on their relevance to the search terms entered. The algorithms used for mobile search are assumed to be similar to those used for web search and as such, the number of linking sites, meta information on the page (description, page title, keywords, etc) are all important.
• Pay per Click (PPC) search is where you buy or bid for key words which results in an advertisement for your site being added to the top of the search results as a shown below. Google Adwords now includes options for targeted mobile PPC but the amount of text available for the advertisement is even more limited than for web.

Another complication is mobile search engines such as Google do not automatically offer mobile friendly sites - users have to manually choose this option after running the search as shown in the screenshot below.

 
Both organic and PPC campaigns can be done reasonably cost effectively but its effectiveness will be determined by how many people use mobile search to find the type of content offered by your site.

Affiliate Links

Affiliate links are where links to your mobile site are provided by another mobile site and there are two broad types of affiliate links available to mobile content publishers:

• Mobile site directories offer large lists of categorised mobile friendly sites and position themselves as a launching point for mobile browsing. It is generally free to get your site listed in these directories but their effectiveness relies on people a) knowing about the directory, and b) bookmarking and using the directory. As Yahoo found in the early days of the web, people soon get sick of navigating through complicated directory structures and quickly went to Google and its search. Examples include find.mobi, Mobilist and Moobi Web.
• Operator off-deck links are lists of off-deck destinations provided from the mobile operator portal as way of generating data usage charges. Here in Australia, examples include the WWW'  tab on Vodafone Live! and the Web' tab on Telstra's and Telstra Bigpond Mobile portal (shown below). These may be provided free of charge or under a sponsorship basis depending on the operator and the position on the page. We have worked with a number of clients who have seen significant traffic growth a results of being listed on the operator portal.

 

Banner Ads

Well established in the web, banner ads in mobile are also an effective way to generate traffic to a mobile site as well as generate revenue for mobile site owners. Banner ads in mobile are generally text or graphic ads situated above or below the main area  of content. The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has published guidelines on banner ad design and placement, however, most sites looking to generate traffic through banner ads will utilise the services of a mobile advertising network.

Mobile advertising networks act as the broker between mobile advertisers and  mobile web site owners.

• A mobile site owner places the relevant code on their pages to pull ads from the mobile advertising network.
• The mobile advertisers orders the advertisement from the mobile ad network, usually with the ability to target specific countries and devices as well as select the type of mobile site on which the ad should be displayed.

There are two ends to the mobile advertising network spectrum.

• Premium ad networks work with high traffic, high profile mobile sites such as operator portals and well-known media publishers. They typically charge on a Cost per 1000 impressions (CPM) basis and may also offer services such as landing page development, video streaming and content downloads. They may also offer broader mobile marketing services and examples include Sensis MediaSmart, Quattro Wireless, and Nokia Media Network.
• Self-service ad networks provide the ability for any mobile site to generate revenue from banner ads and generally work under a Cost Per Click (CPC) model where the advertiser is charged for each click-through to their site. As previously discussed in this blog, these ad networks are susceptible to click fraud, deliver questionable quality in terms of browsers but are far more cost-effective than premium ad networks. Examples include Admob, Mojiva and Mkhoj although all of these would also argue they also offer premium ad network products as well.

With the spectacular success of the iPhone and its App Store, in application advertising is emerging as a new way to drive traffic for smartphones. Similar to banner ads, they provide varying degrees of targeting capability and are typically charged on a CPC or CPM basis.

Traditional Media (with a twist)

Traditional media such as web, print, TV and radio can be used to drive traffic to a mobile site through a number of means. The most obvious is communicating the URL however this requires a) the consumer to remember it, and b) the consumer to be bothered to enter it via their mobile keyboard. The other problem is that it is generally not possible to measure the performance of this type of campaign.

For these reasons, the following options are preferred.

Web to Mobile buttons sit on standard websites and allow the mobile user to enter their mobile number and receive an SMS with the URL for the mobile site. A number of companies offer this service including the ability to customise the web button, specific the URL and report on traffic. This normally involves a monthly fee and a per SMS fee.

The example below is from Campaign Mobile.

SMS Short Codes are able to leverage both traditional media and standard websites, and involve providing a number to which mobile subscribers can send an SMS with a nominated keyword and then receive an SMS with the mobile site URL. Instructions such as "SMS 'Amethon' to 1900 555 123' can be used with print media such as newspaper and magazine ads, billboards, television and radio commercials as well as on websites. The example below is used by carsguide.com.au to market the mobile version of the website.

  

2D Barcodes are scanned via a special reader using the mobile handset camera and can be encoded with the URL of a mobile web site. The barcode reader normally launches the mobile browser which opens the scanned URL enabling quick and simple access to a mobile site. 2D barcodes can be added to both traditional and online media including billboards, newspaper and magazine ads as well as product packaging. There a number of different 2D barcode standards in use for mobile incuding QR codes and Datamatrix codes. The two examples below are both encoded with the Wikipedia mobile site URL. 

QR Code	DataMatrix Code

Tracking and Analysing Campaign Performance

As discussed earlier, it is critical that your traffic generation campaigns can be tracked and analysed to assess their performance. The most basic test is to look at Overall Traffic (page views, sessions and unique visitors) to see if growth correlates with the commencement of a campaign. Unfortunately this does not distinguish between multiple campaigns or filter out random traffic spikes from returning users.

The next phase of analysis might be to look at Referrer Information. When someone clicks a link on a web page (mobile or otherwise), the URL for the page containing the link is included in the request. For example, if someone clicks on a link to amethon.mobi from a Google search page, the referrer information includes www.google.com/search. Referrer information from search engines also generally includes the search terms entered by the subscriber to find your site. This can be very useful for analysing SEO and SEM campaign performance.

Amethon's Mobile Analytics reports traffic from individuals referrers in terms of:

• Total browsing sessions
• Total page views
• Average browsing duration
• Average page views per visit

For traffic from search engines, it also provides a number of reports related to the search term including:

• Total visits generated by each search term or search word
• Totoal visits generated by each search term or search word broken down by search engine

This allows a number of campaign objectives to be measured against each referral source but there a still a number of disadvantages to this method.

• Referrer information is only generated from clicks on other web pages. It will not report campaign performance for SMS Short Codes or basic QR codes
• It cannot distinguish between individual campaign from the same referral source. For example, different banner ad designs from the same ad network
• Some handset browsers do not include the referrer information in the request which means their traffic will not be included in this report. We estimate this may be up to 20% - 30% depending on the market.

The best way to track and analyse individual campaigns is to use URL parameters in the links used to direct subscribers to your site e.g. http//:amethon.mobi?campaign=Admob_Banner. If you are running a lot of campaigns across different media types, using multiple URL parameters in the same link can provide insight across a number of dimensions. Here at Amethon we have developed a standard set of URL parameters to provide a consistent approach to campaign performance measurement:

• Campaign: Highlevel identifier for the campaign which may involve a number of individual media types e.g. ?campaign=New_Product_Launch
• Source: Third party on which an individual campaign is run e.g. ?source=Admob
• Medium: The type of media used for the individual campaign element e.g. ?medium=Web2SMS
• Advertisement: Allows different ad versions to be tested on the same media e.g. ?advertisement=Banner_Design_1

For example, a banner ad running on Admob as part of the campaign for a new product launch would be tracked using the following URL:

http://amethon.mobi?campaign=New_Product_Launch&source=Admob

&medium=Banner&Advertisement=Banner_Design_1 

As shown in the screen shot below, our Mobile Analytics solution can report traffic generated against each of these URL parameters individually.

URL Parameters can also be used to create traffic filters which allows all of our standard reports to be viewed for the subset of traffic generated by the specific campaign. This is ideal for measuring campaign performance in terms of more complicated business objectives e.g. downloading a ringtone, completing a sign up page, etc.

It is not necessary to use all of the URL parameters for every campaign and for some campaigns such as thosed based on SMS, you may need to use a URL shortening service such as tr.im or bit.ly to ensure the full link fits in 160 characters!

Conclusions

There are lots of different ways to drive traffic to a mobile site and the right one for your site will depend on your target audience, campaign objectives and budget. The most important consideration is to ensure you can accurately track the performance of each individual campaign against your campaign objectives.

Admob Marketplace – Burning cash and fighting click-fraud

As a leading provider of analytics solutions for the mobile industry, Amethon Solutions has focused its market positioning on the accuracy of our Mobile Analytics solution, especially compared with traditional page tagging methods. In order to verify our accuracy, we use a number of testing methodologies including known traffic sets as well as manual analysis of real mobile web traffic.

In order to generate mobile web traffic we have set up a small mobile site (amethon.mobi) and pay ad networks including Admob Marketplace and Google Adwords to drive traffic to the site. The traffic is then manually analysed from the server logs in order to verify the various metrics generated by our Mobile Analytics solution are correct.

We have good experience using Google Adwords to drive traffic to our main website and utilise many of the features such as geo-targeting, publisher targeting, key word selection and daily budgets. While there are a lot of similarities between Google Adwords and Admob, there are also a number of important differences.

First is the payment method. Google is effectively post-paid where your credit card is charged monthly in arrears based on the cost of your ads. Admob is based on a pre-paid wallet where you add funds in advance of spending them. The minimum you can add to your wallet is US$50 as shown in the image below.

While US$50 is not much compared with what many people would be spending on Google Adwords per month, it is a lot for someone looking to run a small test of mobile advertising with Admob.

Of more concern is the daily budget limits. With Google Adwords you can budget as little as US$1 per day but with Admob, the minimum daily spend is US$100 as shown in the picture below.

$US3000 per month is definitely more than most people would be spending on their web campaigns so to have this as the effective lower limit for an ongoing mobile campaign (short of constantly recharging your wallet with only $50) seems very restrictive. Having said that, we worked with a client who was analysing the performance of a $1,500 per day Admob campaign!

The next step is to create the ads and set the CPC bid price. Admob supports both standard WAP ads (1c minimum bid) and iPhone specific ads (3c minimum bid) as shown below.

We created three different ads with standard WAP and iPhone variants of each as shown below. Since text ads are limited to 35 characters it is difficult to have compelling creative but it is also possible to upload image ads with four different sizes (120x20, 168x28, 216x36 and 300x50) which are served depending on the screen resolution of the handset.

Funny Videos	Mobile Analytics	Content Fingerprinting

Having already committed $50 to our wallet, we chose to enter the minimum bids assuming that this would reduce the total impressions and slow down the click through. To our surprise, US$50 was consumed in a little over 1 hour! As can be seen by the screenshot below, our campaign generated more than 1 million impressions resulting in 5,000 clicks with an average CTR of 0.48%.

One would assume that the ‘Free funny videos from Amethon!’ ad would significantly outperform the product specific ads but as shown from the Mobile Analytics screenshot below, this was not the case.

The product ads combined to deliver more click throughs than the Funny Video ad while in terms of click through rate, the Funny Video ad was only marginally better (0.51% CTR) compared with the two product ads (both 0.47% CTR).

This raises questions about the quality of the inventory and the effectiveness of Admob as a credible source of traffic. While it is pleasing to think that 1518 people were interested in our Mobile Analytics product, a more likely scenario is that mobile users struggle to differentiate the advertisement from the rest of the site and click on the link anyway. Of the 5000 visitors to our site, only about 7% went to the Mobile Analytics product page despite the fact that 1518 clicked on the Mobile Analytics advertisement.

The final issue that we found with our Admob traffic was the high proportion of what we believe to be click fraud. This is where publishers repeatedly click ads on their own site in order to generate revenue.

When analysing both the click path reports from Mobile Analytics and the raw traffic logs, we noticed that a number of visitors were exhibiting strange behaviour. Rather than arriving at the landing page and then going further into the site or simply bouncing away, these visitors would view the landing page repeatedly without going any further into the site. When we looked at the referring page (the publishing site where our ad was clicked), the domain would be the same but the individual page would be different which suggests they clicked our ad, when back to their site, move to another page and then clicked our ad again. From this we can assume that Admob will block obvious click fraud i.e. repeatedly clicking the same ad on the same page.

The biggest offender clicked through 458 times in about 30 minutes without going to any other page and we estimate that the total number of fraudulent clicks was around 13% of the total click throughs. This suggests that it is a serious problem for Admob and potentially other ad networks, and is something that advertisers need to consider when investing in these types of campaigns.

So in summary, Admob is very good at generating traffic for our Mobile Analytics testing but I would hesitate to recommend it as a useful marketing tool given the restrictive budgeting capabilities, the quality of the subscribers and the high rate of click fraud.

The future of apps is the web browser!

While the current industry focus is on applications, especially for smartphones such as the iPhone, Palm Pre and Gphone, I have always felt that accessing a truely global mass market can only be done through web applications accessed via the native handset browser. It seems that my views are also shared by Google.

Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering vice president and developer evangelist, said in an interview with the Financial Times, that "even Google was not rich enough to support all of the different mobile platforms from Apple’s AppStore to those of the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android and the many variations of the Nokia platform." Having personally spoken to a number of application developers, their challenge has always been balancing the cost of developing and supporting for each handset platform versus the potential market that the new version would bring.

His view is that web browser technology continues to evolve to allow capabilities previously only available through an application to be access by the web browser. For example, the iPhone Safari browser can now access its location information and the Google homepage uses this to indicate your location.

Besides the media hype associated with application development, the other attraction is the monetisation potential offered by the App stores. For mobile websites, the only realistic monetisation options are advertising or revenue share with operators who charge a subscription to access the site.

Right now, it is only the high traffic mobile sites that have any chance of generating a positive return from advertising despite the high click through rates being touted but the audience potential of a mobile website is orders or magnitude greater than any application. 

Is Social Networking the Killer App for Mobile?

Quite a few start ups seem to think so if a recent article in the New York Times is anything to go by.

If you think about it, the mobile device is the perfect medium for social networking for a number of reasons:

From the end user's perspective, the mobile phone is always with you. Why wait until you get to a PC to learn that "Matt is contemplating lunch"? I myself am guilty of updating my status to "Michael is using Facebook on his mobile!". It also means that cameraphone shots can be uploaded immediately and from a business perspective, a client's personal life can be investigated just before you walk into a meeting.

From the startup's perspective, it is about the potential advertising revenues. Mobile phones are highly personal compared with a PC which may be used by multiple people in the same family. Combine this with the demographic and preference information you provide when signing up to a social network site means a perfect channel for targetted advertising.

A recent study by Nielsen Mobile shows just how prevalent mobile advertising has now become with 23% of US mobile subscribers having seen an ad on their screens in the previous month and almost half of those claiming to have responded to at least one mobile ad. While these numbers sound impressive, they are based on a survey of  22,000 "active mobile data users who used at least one non-voice mobile service in the fourth quarter" so perhaps it is not really a statistically representative sample?

Now don't get me wrong, I am not skeptical about mobile advertising and its ability to drive investment in compelling applications, services and content. What I am highlighting is the missing piece in this puzzle - accurate numbers.

Mobile social networking sites will not be able to properly monetise their subscriber base without accurately communicating subscriber activity to advertisers. Everyone can talk about 'registered users', but this will overstate the potential audience if the number of social network sites that I have signed up to  (but never visit) is anything to go by.

What advertisers need are measures such as page impressions, average session time and unique visitors, and most importantly, these need to be accurate!

Since many mobile devices will not support cookies, unique visitors and sessions times can be problematic. Tracking pixels also tend to under count due to image caching by both the handset and the WAP gateway - we typically see errors of around 30% - 35% when comparing our wireline capture technique with page tagging of this type...

So where does this leave mobile social networking? Their biggest competitive threat is not from each other but from the established web players - Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. They all now have mobile versions of their sites, they have existing advertiser relationships and they have enormous and active subscriber bases.

 

Big plans for the small screen by Michael Stone

Mobile marketing and advertising has really started to gain some traction in the broader media over the past few months. In 2006, Yankee Group forecast the mobile ad market to more than quadruple to US$275m in 2007 and eventually increase to US$2.2bn in 2010, up from an estimated US$60m in 2006. A more recent forecast from Strategy Analytics is even more bullish suggesting that advertisers will spend US$1.4 billion on mobile media this year, rising to US$14.4 billion by 2011. They predict that mobile media advertising will account for a fifth of global spending on Internet advertising by 2011. Abi Group has also forecast some impressive numbers with their 2011 figure topping US$19b including mobile search and video advertising.

As a key application and driver for both Content Fingerprinting and Portal Analytics, this has definitely been music to our ears but it is worth taking a step back to try and put some of the hype into perspective.

We are seeing a number of general themes emerging in terms of how to leverage mobile phones as channel for advertising and marketing.

1. SMS to win/SMS to register interest: Allows brands to solicit interest from potential customers and typically complemented by print media, packaging, etc. This is now very common and has a well established business model

2. Mobile Portal banner ads: Very similar to the banner ad model on the internet today but constrained by device capability and consumer use of mobile devices for browsing the internet. Both of these are improving which will speed industry growth. Check out the Toyota ad on wap.drive.com.au as an example. The traditional media players are leading they way by simply adding a mobile channel to their existing print, TV or internet rate cards. This has also led to the birth of intermediaries such as Admob which is positioning as the Google Adwords of the mobile domain linking mobile site publishers with advertisers.

3. Mobile Search: Similar to the internet model and will increase rapidly as consumers use mobile search engines from Google and Yahoo to navigate off-net content. It will be typical pay to get to the top of the list stuff and even more important when there is only a small screen.

4. Branded Content: Most operators are offering mobile services such as news alerts, video streaming, etc. These are now being sponsored by brands so you will increasingly see pre- and post-roll adverts. For the 2007 Superbowl, Pepsi partnered with Sprint Mobile in the US on a range of mobile marketing initiatives including sponsorship of the live highlights mobile videos.

5. Viral Marketing: This is our speciality as we provide technology to operators that allows them to track mobile content as it is shared/forwarded P2P. The key application is to allow branded content (viral video or animated gif) to be seeded to a small target group and then leverage their social network to distribute it further.

Of course, we see these mixed and matched, for example, allowing consumers to use an SMS shortcode to  request rich media content delivered via MMS which is also viral. Location based information is also being used to improve the relevance of the message to the end user.

It is also heartening to see a number of organisations trying to develop guidelines for agencies and brands on mobile advertising to ensure that the end user experience is as compelling as possible. The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) in the US is leading the way others such as the AIMIA Mobile Industry Group in Australia are not far behind.  Everyone in the industry is keen to ensure that many of the mistakes made on the internet are not repeated on mobile!

Ultimately the most successful mobile advertising strategies will be those that try to hold a conversation with the consumer. As with any conversation, it needs to be informative, relevant and two-way, and the mobile is the ideal vehicle.

To finish off, something funny but incredibly relevant to this topic. Enjoy!