Mobile Strategy » Mobile Analytics

iPhone Core Location Cannot Be Used Primarily For Advertising

Jose HC — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 06:46:36 +0000

If you were planning on popping a lot of location-based ads into your upcoming killer iPhone app, you might want take a peek at the latest update from Apple for developers. A rather stern note on the site reads: “If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.” Is Apple doing this to prevent abuse from advertisers, so that users won’t end up with advertisements from stores all around them? There isn’t any real explanation as to why this isn’t allowed, but it’s certainly worth taking note if you’re building an app with the intention of putting advertisements in. After all, you wouldn’t want to spend your precious time building an app only to find out that it will be rejected by Apple, right?

via ubergizmo.com

Interesting little tid bit. Somewhere else folks have been wondering out loud if this has anything to do with Apple’s purchase of Quattro or some other secret juicy soon to be released nugget? Unfortunately I don’t recall where or who was doing this wondering…

It certainly can’t be about diluting the App Store right? It is already flooded with loads of sub-quality apps… so what is this about?

Or I may be wrong. Perhaps they are just trying to clean up and tighten control to prevent users from being spammed with ads…

Regardless of the underlying reason why Apple is doing this it is for the good of the industry. It does make one feel protected and looked after doesn’t it?

Posted via web from Mobile Strategy

Mobile Analytics Providers – Updated with Umber Systems

Jose HC — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 05:59:13 +0000

It has been a while since I last updated the Mobile Analytics Providers list. The folks at Umber recently dropped me a note to alert me of their company. So they have become provider number 38 on our Mobile Analytics list.

Note from their website that there is an emphasis on ‘data’ with terms like mobile data monitoring and mobile data analytics. Sometime in the near future I am supposed to talk to them to get a better grasp for what they offer.

From their website:

As mobile data usage proliferates, carriers, media, and marketers are faced with a key challenge: how to extract revenue from mobile data usage. Lack of visibility into what mobile users are doing with data, which applications are being consumed, and how usage correlates with user demographics and location have made it impossible to build actionable user profiles.

Umber® provides the first, intelligent monitoring and analytics solution that works across applications, devices, networks, and locations. Umber provides a clear, accurate, and ongoing picture of mobile data usage.

Plus their emphasis on user behavior is what really interests me…

Unlike web analytics—which monitor, collect, and analyze user behavior at a site level—mobile network analytics have been severely limited by a wide disparity of networks, devices, demographic databases, and location databases. This same level of user behavior analysis and reporting would be extremely valuable to carriers, media, and marketers; allowing them to target content for significantly more effective marketing; but accomplishing this requires a new class of technologies. This is where Umber comes in.

Umber® has created the first real-time, automated, and transparent solution for gathering insight into mobile data usage. Umber’s patent-pending monitoring and analytics solution allows marketers to understand the behavior of mobile users.

I will let you know more as soon as I know more. Visit Umber Systems here.

BTW – It has slowly and almost by accident become a policy that if you reach out to me and want to talk about your product or service, and I believe it adds value to the mobile ecosystem, I will attempt to write about it. You can reach me via this Blog, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Commentary on Google’s Acquisition of AdMob

Jose HC — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:24:07 +0000

As you can probably tell I have been away. But before I get to the summary of the Mobile Money Conference (in the next post) I want to get this out of the way to avoid any distractions. What can be better than my opinion on Google’s acquisition of AdMob? Well … the opinion of those smarter than yours truly. Our Mobile Analytics Provider list will undoubtedly change in the aftermath of this deal … but for now below are four excerpts of expert commentaries for you to read and follow to their source.

1. Open Gardens’ Ajit Jaokar -

But why is this acquisition such a big landmark?

The Admob acquisition and growth reflects a deeper trend by the customer towards Mobile Web and Mobile Apps. It indicates that Mobile Web and Mobile Apps are becoming the most significant elements of the Mobile industry surpassing both Voice and SMS in importance.

Why? We all know that Mobile Web and Mobile Apps are a significant(if not primary) mode of access to the Web for many people .. but the Admob figures indicate that the manner of access is significant ..

Historically, the belief was – people accessed the Mobile Web with an ‘intent’ (such as ‘find my nearest’) .. If that were the case, we would never have seen such a large number of ad impressions. So, the Mobile Web access has become pervasive .. instead of ‘intent based.’ In other words, the Mobile Web (and Mobile Apps) have arrived.

Read entire post entitled ‘The acquisition of Admob by Google is as big as the launch of the iPhone‘ here.

2. Gartner’s Nick Jones

Unlike me, Google has started its Christmas buying early, having splashed out $750M on Admob this week. Google also just announced an upgrade to Latitude that supports location history tracking and location alerts (e.g. to notify you when friends are in the vicinity). These events are related. They’re moves in a massive emerging war to own mobile contextual information and applications which will include location-specific advertising and many other location-related business models. Apple are behind in this location game, but I expect MobileMe will get more sophisticated. Expect a future mega-vendor battleground between Google, Nokia, Apple, maybe Microsoft and a few others.

Read entire post entitled Bah Hambug! here.

3. Mobile Marketing Watch

Think about it- if an app developer decides to monetize his app via in-app advertising, who do you think he’ll chose as his provider; Google or one of the many cookie-cutter mobile ad-networks that have popped up all over the place…

When looking at the two most talked-about mobile OSs — the iPhone and Android — Google already dominates the mobile search functions on both devices, and now with it’s acquisition of AdMob, will dominate mobile app advertising on both devices through their respective app stores as well.

Read the rest of the post entitled ‘Google’s AdMob Deal Solidifies It’s Future Mobile Marketing Dominance‘ here.

4. Sensidea’s Jaafer Haidar

[AdMob has] built up quite an impressive business in a few short years; not only becoming the largest mobile ad network, but also amassing an amazing amount of data on how people are using and engaging in mobile applications… Google now has access to a ton of competitive data that will bode well in the mobile platform war just heating up with Apple. I’m not discounting AdMob’s ad business but if it was the ads Google wanted then why did they wait so long to make the buy?

Read entire post entitled ‘Google Buys AdMob. What Took So Long?‘ here.Similar Posts:

Mobile Strategy Site Visitors and Mobile Themes

Jose HC — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:11:23 +0000

In an effort to understand why some of you visit the Mobile Strategy Blog I have done a quick analysis of the search engine referrals. Of course this is a circuitous analysis because your searches bring you here due to the content and keywords on this site which are indexed by the search engines (mostly Google). This analysis merely helps me to focus further on the main topics or themes that are already bringing you here. The most important outcome of this analysis will hopefully be that it forces me to drop some of the filler that I write when I am either too busy or lazy to give you some good stuff.

The dates of the downloaded stats do not coincide with each other 100%… but they provide sufficient information for our purposes.

The Searches

October 14 to 26
Extracted from Clicky – Link Below

Traffic to the Mobile Strategy Blog comes from three main sources:

Direct Traffic 30.3%
Referring Sites 39.1%
Search Engines 29.8%
Other 0.8%

Direct traffic is just that… those of you who either have this site bookmarked or know the URL by memory.

Referring sites are mostly LinkedIn, Twitter, link backs, blogs I have left comments at or those blogs that have this site in their blogroll (like Enterprise Mobility Matters and Mobile Manifesto).

You know what search engines are. The interesting point here is that 92% of the searches during this time period came from Google, 6% from Bing and 1% from Yahoo.

The Keywords

October 14 to 26
Extracted from Clicky – Link Below

We could slice these in different ways and there are too many (including onesies) that do not add that much value to your searches but that in the right combination still brought some of you here. The top 5 keywords used during searches on this site for this period were the following:

mobile 22%
strategy 9%
banking 5%
application 4%
canada 3%

The top 5 or all of the individual keywords that brought readers over here during this period do not really tell the story so let’s get to the exciting stuff below.

Mobile Strategy Themes

October 14 to 26
Extracted from Clicky – Link Below

This is what I did:

Took the entire list of searches
Filtered out nonsense and mistakes
Classified the remaining ones into main themes

And these are the mobility themes that brought searchers to this blog with their corresponding weights:

Mobile Strategy 33%
Mobile Banking 20%
Mobile Application Development 18%
Mobile Analytics 7%
Enterprise Mobility 6%
Mobile Ecosystem 5%
Mobile Venture Capital 4%
Other 6%

From this I can only assume that visitors to this blog that do not come through searches are also drawn here by the same content and themes. As much as possible we will try and focus on the first three themes (mobile strategy, mobile banking or financial services and mobile application development). However we will also give it our best shot to provide you relevant links and interesting stories on the next four topics which are still very interesting to us (mobile analytics, enterprise mobility, mobile ecosystem and mobile venture capital).

Hope this helps you as much as it did me.
If you want to see something specific here please drop a comment below.

Get Clicky
Of the four different analytics programs (non-mobile) that I use here my favourite is Clicky Web Analytics. If you are interested in checking it out you can use my little code – here Get Clicky.

Google Analytics Mobile Reporting

Jose HC — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:27:42 +0000

Last week Google announced a slew of new features for Google Analytics. As we posted on Friday of special interest to us is the expanded mobile reporting capabilities. Please note that if you are looking for an Enterprise solution or for something that will help you understand overall mobile behavior you will not find it in the expanded mobile reporting from Google Analytics. Even those writing about are still very much focused on the mobile marketing and mobile advertising spaces. I am sure that comes to no surprise to you, however, more attention should be given to actual mobile end user behaviors in an effort to understand users not as advertising consumers but as overall consumers and of course of interest to many of you – as enterprise users.

This from the Google Analytics Blog:

Expanded Mobile Reporting: Google Analytics now tracks mobile websites and mobile apps so you can better measure your mobile marketing efforts. If you’re optimizing content for mobile users and have created a mobile website, Google Analytics can track traffic to your mobile website from all web-enabled devices, whether or not the device runs JavaScript. This is made possible by adding a server side code snippet to your mobile website which will become available to all accounts in the coming weeks (download snippet instructions). We will be supporting PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX sites in this release. Of course, you can still track visits to your regular website coming from high-end, Javascript enabled phones.

iPhone and Android mobile application developers can now also track how users engage with apps, just as with tracking engagement on a website. What’s more, for apps on Android devices, usage can be tied back to ad campaigns: from ad to marketplace to download to engagement. Check out the SDKs and technical documentation on mobile apps tracking to get started. And coming soon, you’ll be able to see breakout data on mobile devices and carriers in the new Mobile reports in the Visitors section!

I am sure some of you will test this in the coming weeks and we will have a better idea of what its true value and differentiators are.

In the meantime here are some other places writing about it:

Adweek – Google Wades Into Mobile Analytics
Searchcowboys – Google Analytics finally lets you track mobile apps
Mobile Marketing Watch – Google Expands Mobile Reporting In Analytics

Similar Posts:

Mobile Analytics Providers – Updated with Google Analytics

Jose HC — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:25:32 +0000

I will add more detail on what Google is offering later today. For now you can check the updated Mobile Analytics page with the Google entry as #37. You can also read the announcement from the Google Analytics Blog here.

Not All Mobile Applications Are Created Equal

Jose HC — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:17:45 +0000

And therefore do not require the same metrics. Of course if you are developer for-fun as opposed to a for-profit one you may note be too concerned about this. However you will never know where and how to improve something unless you measure it. If you measure there is a better chance of understanding how your applications is being used…

A lot of times there is a mad rush to put something out there and then we simply forget about it… and worry only about installations and nothing beyond that. But you should worry about it especially if we consider our recent post on media convergence and mobility.

I can’t say much more about this right now but come back (subscribe at the top right) and you will see this topic blossom into a full-fledged discussion.Similar Posts:

Mobile Analytics Update

Jose HC — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:51:01 +0000

Just added four more providers to the Mobile Analytics page. There is obviously further parsing and analysis that needs to be done… but for now it is just a list and it is your job to go find them. The response so far has been great – if you have any further information please let me know.