There’s a real need for good mobile analytics. It’s difficult to get reliable statistics on mobile web usage particularly on a site by site basis. That could be changing soon, AdMob, the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace, is rolling out a new mobile analytics suite which looks very promising.
It’s called AdMob Mobile Analytics and sounds a lot like a Google Analytics for mobile sites. It will be completely free and available to all mobile publishers whether they are AdMob customers or not. Here’s a video of AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui demonstrating Admob Mobile Analytics.
Analytics will be driven by a 1×1 px tracking image added to pages by publishers and will let them view traffic by referrer, operator, device, screen size and geographical region and be able to see bounce rates, pages per visit, time on site and much more. Advertisers will get access to comparative results by campaign and the ability to track actions after a user clicks through to their landing page. The screenshots give taste of the variety and detail in Analytics’s reports.
Initially Mobile Analytics will be offered as a Private Beta. You can apply now at analytics.admob.com. The beta will be rolled out gradually to applicants, with preference given to current AdMob customers. AdMob is aiming at general availability in a couple of months and has plans for even more features. The company’s VP of Marketing, Jason Spero, told me that by Q3, publishers will be able to opt in to sharing data which will allow users to compare their traffic with similar sites.
AdMob is already the best source for Mobile Statistics with their monthly AdMob Mobile Metrics which is great for tracking the growth of mobile web usage by region and device. 
I think the addition of data from Analytics to Mobile Metrics should further establish the company as the premier source for mobile statistics. I asked Jason about that possibility and he said that AdMob hopes to enhance Metrics with aggregated data from Analytics “in the not too distant future”
Admob’s Mobile Analytics is great news for everyone in the mobile web industry, except perhaps vendors of competitive tools. It will help advertisers to increase effectiveness by better targeting and will give publishers an increased understanding of their users and help them deliver more targeted content. Given AdMob’s huge market share among both publishers and advertisers and the fact that that the program is both free and extremly powerful, I expect it will quickly become the standard mobile site analytics product.
Images courtesy of AdMob
Video courtesy of YouTube
We respect AdMob for what it has done to kick start the mobile ad revolution but in our experience, marketers place ads across a number of ad networks so it’s important they get independent stats on what’s working. Are you going to get that independence from one ad network?
That’s why the likes of Omniture and Coremetrics have an important role to play in the PC world. We believe the same will happen on mobile. We launched Bango Analytics in February so marketers could track the success of their mobile ad campaigns – http://www.bango.com/analytics – with that independence upmost in our minds. Read the Tapatap case study at http://www.bango.com/casestudies to see how they use Bango Analytics as an independent auditing tool.
Ahhh it’s nice to be a market leader and have imitators try and keep up, imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery.
Being first to market in October last year we are in a position that since having launched Amethon Mobile Analytics there have been 6 other vendors who have now launched mobile analytics applications in one form or another.
They all have their strengths and weaknesses (check out an independent review by Bryson Meunier of Resolution Media http://www.brysonmeunier.com/the-mobile-seo-s-guide-to-mobile-analytics if you want a list of vendors).
It’s important to point out that Amethon are still the only vendor to use Wireline Capture – so we see 100% of the traffic from the cellular phone browsers to the mobile content webservers, importantly this also means that there is no additional ‘weight’ added to the content pages through the use of page tags or pixel beacons which whilst not an issue on desktop analytics is a heavy burden on limited mobile bandwidth.
It’s great to have more competition from Admob but as was discussed at the New York Mobile Monday panel earlier this week the real issue with using an advertisers networks analytics is you are then stuck with them. You are tied to relying on their platform to tell you how much money you spent with them, and you are also not able to track alternative competing ad network providers.
It’s a great solution when it’s free but free always has strings in one form or another.
If you want a truly independent view on what’s happening with your mobile content come over and check out http://www.Amethon.com
Regards,
Dean Collins
http://www.Amethon.com
[email protected]
Phone: +1 646-240-4043