Amethon Insights

Mobile Analytics Hots Up!

It is amazing how quickly this industry moves! While we have been heads down, bums up, launching our Mobile Analytics solution, securing customers and rolling out new releases, analytics for the mobile internet has suddenly matured to the point where there are 4 specialist players in the market and people are doing product reviews.

So why Mobile Analytics from Amethon?

• Optimized for Mobile: We have done a lot of research into how mobile devices and mobile networks differ from the fixed internet in order to maximise accuracy in areas like unique visitor counts, handset identification, operator identification, bot detection and filtering, and filtering PC browsing from mobile browsing.
• Mobile Specific Metrics: With the wide variety of mobile devices, mobile browsers and capabilities, it is important to know what sort of phones are using your site and what capabilities they have. We also breakdown mobile operator and country of origin which is critical for assessing the success of on-deck referrals, etc.
• Search Terms and Referrers: Page tagging solutions using a image tag or similar cannot capture referrer and search term information. Our solution tracks and reports all of this information to help you calculate the ROI from affiliates, ad placement and paid search.
• No Page Weight or Latency: Our off the wire capture method relies on analysing a mirrored copy of the HTTP traffic requiring no additional code to be added to the page. Once our system is deployed, it automatically starts analysing all of your pages without having to go through the effort of tagging them. Page tags also add 'weight' to the page which slows download speed and increases the data cost to the end users. The end users also has to wait for the tag to be delivered so what happens if the page tag server is busy...
• Near Real Time Reporting: Rather than waiting 24 hours for you stats, how about 5 minutes? That is the refresh cycle for our Mobile Analytics platform, irrespective of traffic levels. We are also able to provide 'live' visitor information i.e. who is browsing the site now, what pages have they viewed, what search terms brought them to your site, etc.

This is definitely a positive step for everyone in the industry as it raises awareness of how different the mobile internet is from normal PC based browsing and why AWStats, Google Analytics and other web-centric analytics solutions just won't give the right results or relevant information.

‘So how big is it?’ – The challenges and opportunities of measuring off-deck by Michael Stone

In my previous blog article, I mentioned mobile banner ads as one of the key forms of Mobile Advertising. What I forgot to mention was that it be a key driver in the growth of mobile internet outside the Operator’s portal, known as off-deck.

As mobile operators open up the walled garden and allow their subscribers to browse any site on the internet, we are seeing all of the major internet publishers scramble to ‘mobilise’ their existing content assets providing a much larger range of content and services to the mobile subscriber compared to their operator’s portal. The question is, are subscribers actually going off-deck and where exactly are they going?

This question is not asked out of curiosity but because understanding the size and extent of off-decl mobile browsing is fundamental to growing our industry. It starts with the content and media owners who gauge their investment in mobile based on its perceived effectiveness as a delivery channel to consumers. It then drives agencies and brands to pay content and media owners to host mobile advertising or sponsor services on the assumption that they can engage potential customers. You only have to look at the structured approach to television ratings to realize how independent and transparent measurement drives investment in both the content itself (TV shows and movies) and the associated advertising.

Measurement can also assist us as an industry to identify areas for improvement to drive uptake and usage of the mobile internet even higher. In particular, it can help to uncover the problems and barriers to mobile browsing which can be addressed through consumer or industry education campaigns.

So it is pretty clear that being able to measure off-deck browsing activity is fundamentally important for our industry – the next question is how do we do it?

The answer is that it is much easier than for the internet or even TV, and the results of this measurement is potentially much more accurate and informative.

All off-deck and on-deck mobile browsing in Australia goes through four points, the networks of our mobile operators (Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and Hutchison), compared with the hundreds of ISP’s and millions of televisions measured by internet and TV ratings.  Both internet and television measurement rely on representative samples to develop industry statistics, however by measuring at these four points, we are able to see and measure every mobile browsing event in the country.

The personal nature of a mobile phone also increases the validity and accuracy of this type of measurement. Whereas all family members might use a given PC or watch the same television, each mobile phone invariably corresponds to an individual subscriber.

Furthermore, every operator has extensive demographic and segmentation information on their customer base, especially post-paid subscribers. Information gathered during signup of the subscriber typically includes gender, age, address and employment status. Combined with their usage patterns, each mobile subscriber can be categorised within the operator’s specific segmentation model which may include types such as early adopters, mature achievers or young sociables.

All this sounds fantastic but what do we need to do to make this happen?

The Mobile Industry Development group within Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA) has established a Mobile Measurement initiative to further explore these possibilities and work with the operators and the rest of the industry to realise this opportunity. It will also focus on ensuring that the privacy and rights of consumers are protected given the sensitive nature of this information. Technically there are a number of options including aggregating statistics already gathered by the operators or deploying specific platforms such as Amethon’s Portal Analytics solution. It is early days for the mobile internet and our Mobile Measurement initiative but stay tuned for more information on both!

In conclusion, the mobile industry has the potential to provide measurements and statistics to media publishers, content owners, advertisers and brands with greater completeness, accuracy and relevance than any other communications channel. This will drive both investment in our industry as well as improvement to the services and products being offered to consumers, which are exactly the sorts of outcomes that the AIMIA Mobile Industry Group is seeking.

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!

Viral Marketing Demo at Mobile Monday Sydney by Michael Stone

A few of us attended Mobile Monday last night where it was open mike night i.e. anyone could get up an talk about their company, their views on the industry etc. I took the opportunity to talk a bit about Amethon and our products but also used the occassion to demonstrate a mobile viral marketing campaign.

I had downloaded a few clips from YouTube which I though would be entertaining for the crowd and then put together an MMS which included a video followed by some comments around Amethon, our logo and then a link to our .mobi site. Receivers were also able to download more videos from the .mobi site.

The audience was asked to provide me with their mobile numbers and I then sent it to about 12 different people.

Of course the underlying message was that if Content Fingerprinting was available, we could track the video as well as the ones from the .mobi site every time it was forwarded.

The demonstration also highlighted a few key components we think is required for a successful viral marketing campaign i.e. some compellling content, subtle branding, a call to action and a relevant reward.

So, how successful was my demonstration? Unfortunately without Content Fingerprinting we will never know...

MMS Congress 2007 by Michael Stone

In late March I attended the MMS Congress 2007 in Munich. This was one of the better conferences I have been to as there was strong operator representation and even the vendor presentations were reasonably constrained in their product marketing. The organisers had also put together a good agenda structure that had a strong logical flow.

There were three distinct focus areas in the operator case study presentations:

1. A2P MMS: What types of content and services are being delivered via MMS (voice mail, email, alerts, sports, etc),
2. P2P MMS: What is being done to encourage and stimulate P2P MMS (push stimulation campaigns, marketing/promotion, price elasticity, user education)
3. P2A MMS: Emerging Mobile 2.0 applications such as photo blogging/sharing, citizen journalism, competitions, etc

My conclusion is that we need to be doing all of the above in order to offer something of interest to as many subscribers as possible so they start using MMS in the first place and then keep using it in different ways.

For example, a presenter from an operator in the Middle East has 70% of MMS traffic being A2P as they use it to deliver all content to subscribers. He believe this in turn teaches people about MMS and they start using it P2P.

All presenters agreed on the need to get the basics right. Maybe we are spoiled in Australia but many markets still have significant issues with non-delivery of MMS, especially between carriers. They say you don't get a second chance to make a first impression and this is particularly true for new technology. I'm sure there are many subscribers who got their new camera phone, took a picture, sent it to a friend or family member only to have it disappear into the aether...

Another key theme from the conference was the need to start thinking of MMS as a bearer for other applications and services as well as a P2P messaging technology. For example, one operator has launched a voice mail service which delivers each recorded message via MMS rather then requiring the subscriber to dial in.

This as a number of great advantages including:

• The sending number for MMS is the phone number of the person leaving the voicemail. This means you can immediately see who the voicemail was from including their name if it is in your address book.
• You only need to listen to the messages you want to rather than having to go through all of your voice mails in chronological order.
• Your storage of messages is only limited by the handset and not the operator's message deletion policy.
• It is easy to reply with a message, call the sender or even forward the message to someone else through the existing messaging functionality of the handset
• Messages are deliver via best effort packet data reducing the demand on voice channels in the network

The moral of the story is that all operators have invested a lot of time and money into getting MMS to where it is today and it is now time to start generating a return on that investment!

Jumping on the bandwagon by Michael Stone

Amethon Solutions has now launched a company blog. Let's not beat around the bush - this is a marketing initiative for the company but hopefully it will also serve to entertain and inform!