(Customer) Information Is Power: Mobile Analytics Space Heats Up As AdMob Stakes Its Turf
In-Brief: A look at AdMob Mobile Analytics & an exclusive Q&A that connects the dots to describe the competitive landscape and answer the all-important question: Why does data matter? Plus: A surprising scoop direct from Bango CEO Ray Anderson ….
Jason Spero, AdMob VP Marketing, pre-briefed me on the company’s new release analytics tool just prior to my last speaking engagement. I was excited because I could see this was not just another product announcement (and thus I decided not to report it as one).
It’s a tool that puts AdMob back in play and potentially one step ahead of rival vendors including Amethon Solutions, Google (which hasn’t yet launched a mobile analytics product!), Mobilytics, TigTags and Wapalizer. In fact, this worthwhile assessment via ClickZ concludes Bango is AdMob’s closest challenger, and I’m inclined to agree.
Or could it be the other way around?
In any case, it’s not a question I will attempt to answer in this post. I chose to use the AdMob announcement as a hook for a discussion I miss on the significance of the offer and the likely impact on the mobile analytics space.
First, why should we care about mobile analytics – period?
By way of background: Analytics on a PC revolves around the existence of embedded JavaScript code in the pages of a website. That works a treat on PCs because the majority of browsers support JavaScript. Mobile devices fail to support JavaScript sufficiently, so it’s not a reliable tracking mechanism. The same goes for cookies. They do work on some mobile browsers, but in the majority of cases they get lost, jumbled or removed when the user moves from one site to another. Referral information — information in a PC scenario that can indicate where the user has come from and recount the journey from Page A to Page B and so on — is not reliable so the advertiser/publisher cannot know precisely who is visiting a site and how they got there.
Finally, the last resort, looking up the IP address, doesn’t work either as the process identifies the IP address of the mobile operator’s mobile gateway, and not the individual devices running on it. (Expect to see these points dominate our discussion of the mobile Web for months to come – and look for more analysis from MSG going forward.)
But it’s not just about tracking; it’s about providing publishers/providers/brands deep insight into mobile Web usage, the effectiveness of mobile advertising campaigns and the key performance metrics that enable them to craft, fine-tune and execute their own individual algorithms for success.
This requirement is all the more acute now that mobile operators are in D2C mode and shifting their focus from access to audience. Indeed, I am reminded of this exclusive podcast with Chetan Sharma, and his warning – also outlined in his recent book on mobile advertising – that operators have 2-3 years to learn to act as media companies, or be replaced by other players who can.
I was about to write a large number of mobile operators – as well as the vision of a more open mobile Web – off for good, but the last weeks’ events have provided welcome evidence to the contrary. Mobile operators are shifting their strategies from “command and control” to “connect and cultivate.”
Take Vodafone’s decision last week to offer unlimited Internet access as a standard feature of its new monthly mobile price plans in the U.K. It will not only fuel the use of Internet on mobile phones; it will allow Vodafone to build a new source of competitive advantage providing its customers no-brainer access to the Internet and the off-portal destinations they want most. (We have it direct from Vodafone that the top three Internet sites on Vodafone Mobile Internet are Facebook, Google, and the BBC. The top three searches by customers are Facebook, Bebo, and eBay.)
To be fair, the “unlimited” offer has a catch: a 500 megabyte cap on usage. Still, it’s a shift in operator thinking that will give the mobile Web the shot in the arm it sorely needs.
At the other end of the spectrum, mobile operators including Spain’s Telefonica, Telecom Italia and Telenor are throwing open their networks and network resources to enable third-party developers to create and deliver a deluge of new services around personalization, location, presence – the works!
Put simply, a wide open mobile Web chock-full of services, apps and ad campaigns catered to our context (after all, personal devices require personalized offers) creates a new need for tools that tell us what flies and why.
This is where mobile analytics comes in – and one reason why you can expect this space to heat up big-time.
Is AdMob vs. Bango the one to watch? Let’s just say they are best positioned in a space that is crowding fast as players including Amethon Solutions, Mobilytics, TigTags and Wapalizer jockey for position. In fact, Bango already told the blogosphere to brace for improvements to its Bango Analytics. But I also know from AdMob that it, too, is planning its next move – so watch for a game-changing announcement soon.
A few words about the Bango “announcement.” Today I contacted Bango CEO Ray Anderson to find out more. Ray revealed the new feature, called Goal Comparison, will “let advertisers see how many people who came from a particular ad campaign actually reached the goal for that campaign, be it signing up for a service, click to call or buying content.” Bango’s unique user ID, which is a kind of digital finger print, tracks individual users as they enter a site and then reach a specified goal. To date this feature is not available in other analytics products. Count on MSG to have more detail and a deep-dive Q&A later this week.
What is AdMob’s offer?
In a nutshell the AdMob Mobile Analytics gives clients insight into site-performance metrics (the number of unique visitors, duration of visits, page performance) user data (geography, operator, and handset information) and where the traffic is coming from (search engines, direct traffic, and advertising campaigns). The service is in beta, is free for unlimited use, and can track ad campaigns carried out through competing ad networks as well as through AdMob’s partners.
Offering its analytics tool to clients for free is a strategy that could well play in AdMob’s favor. Bango Analytics is available for free for up to 10,000 page hits per month. After that there is a “low monthly charge depending on activity levels.” However, publishers that purchase Bango’s payment products receive full Bango Analytics capabilities at no additional cost. (Check out MSG’s coverage of Bango’s offer and exclusive podcast.)
So, what spurred AdMob to throw its hat into the ring? And what does this company hope to accomplish with this offer. I caught up with Jason for some straight answers to tough questions.
Here is an excerpt of our impromptu Q&A:
Q: You have been quoted as saying that AdMob decided to offer analytics for free as a catalyst for the mobile Web. Please elaborate on how allowing advertisers to measure and manage their campaigns can spark wider interest and growth.
A: Mobile analytics is about tracking for sure, but it’s also about optimizing customer acquisition and optimizing content for users. Analytics is at the core of this because companies need to understand which pages are highly engaging to users, which pages they read and which ones they ignore. Companies also want to understand which devices or which geographies deliver more page visits and why.
Access to this level of detail allows our customers to segment their customers, tailor their offers, and plan and execute approaches that will yield results – more importantly, measurable results. As sites get better at giving users what they want, because they have a reliable feedback loop, then more consumers will use the mobile Internet. Usage goes up and it’s a virtuous cycle.
Right now, AdMob is working with a client on a campaign that requires users to take action. [With our tool] the user can do more can track the clicks. They can drill down to see how the [ad] dollars they spent translate into a ROI because they can see how many users responded and actually made that call, or signed up for an alert, or did whatever the campaign called for.
Q: I can see how analytics can close the credibility gap and provide advertisers with the metrics they demand. But why have you made it free? Chris Anderson, for example, argues that offering technology tools for free flies in the face of a free market…
A: Because we believe that AdMob Mobile Analytics will be a critical catalyst for the mobile Web, we decided to offer it for free. We would not have been able to do this if we had to build the technologies from scratch, but these components were in place already so offering it for free will more than pay us back.
We also believe this approach is best if we are going to tackle two key problems: Monetization and discovery. We’re hearing from our customers, from our partners, and from our publishers that they need a tool to help them improve their offers and better their content. To do this they need to understand users; they need to understand traffic patterns and they need to understand consumption of their sites. Here our tool is part of a content-driving play. It’s core to the business model we already have.
But we benefit equally even if third-parties, who aren’t our customers and don’t use us to serve ads, choose to use AdMob Mobile Analytics. When they can track results and know what works, then the mobile Web experience becomes richer for the consumer and – quite frankly – the industry becomes richer in the process.
Those are the chief reasons that we made it free. But there is another motivation: AdMob craves data. We crave data on how the mobile web is used and we crave data on how users move around the mobile Web. So, by introducing an analytics product into the market, as we have, we’re putting ourselves in the path of even more data.
Q: Might that also show up in future versions of your monthly metrics?
A: There’s ways it will and there’s ways it won’t. AdMob stands by its commitment not to view, use or publish any of the data that is specific to a site of campaign. However, to the extent that this becomes a mainstream analytics product, there will be aggregate learning that could be valuable to the broader community. Today, we publish the metrics report based on our ad-serving network. But at some point we would look at how we could use broader data to complement that.
Q: Now that mobile analytics are more or less table stakes – how do you plan to build and maintain AdMob’s market position?
A: What we’re doing with AdMob Mobile Analytics is not a new play. There are free tools on the PC Web that have been launched for exactly the same reason. However, this is about the mobile Internet and our goal, our motivation, is to provide the catalyst for the growth and diversity of content as we discussed.
Obviously, our business model does not turn on people using our analytics product. We believed the market needed a rich analytics product and so we built one. Some of the products out there are more labor-intensive to install and require users to change the links on their page, which, if the site has been built in-house, is hard. And if the site has been built by a third-party, is both hard and expensive. Our advantage lies in our conscious choice to provide these rich tools and a product roadmap that I can’t detail at this time.
Q: While we’re on the topic, I want to give you a chance to respond to the buzz in the blogosphere since you released AdMob Mobile Analytics last week. First, what of the claim that your customers have more or less forced you to develop and release this tool? Are you a latecomer?
A: We have the kind of relationship with our customers and our partners that they give us feedback on a regular basis. So did they force us to? No. Did they ask us to? Absolutely, because the market wasn’t providing this and we’re the only people providing them solutions.
To phrase it in such a way that the customers made you do this from a negative perspective shows that you’re not building a customer-responsive product. Our whole idea here is to solve our customers’ problems. So we’re proud of doing this because our customer’s needed it.
Q: We know why you did it – how about how you do it. For a start, I understand that you use code or tags on the site to apply analytics. Why — and is there a downside to this approach? Amethon maintains adding code to a site can weigh it down.
A: First you need to understand how AdMob’s Ad Network technology works. Put simply, users visit mobile web pages. Those pages call our server and pass mobile contextual data. In milliseconds, AdMob analyzes that ad-serving opportunity, identifies eligible ads, scores those eligible ads for that specific opportunity, and selects a single ad to serve. We pass that ad back to the site and it is included in the page the user sees. To enable all of this, AdMob has invested in technologies including user identification, user metadata analysis and tracking – all anonymous, simple and flexible site enablement code – for our publisher sites; and tracking, logging and real-time reporting.
To date we have used these technologies to serve ads. Our mobile analytics tool builds on this base. It’s a platformization of AdMob’s mobile ad-serving technologies, and most of the components critical to AdMob Mobile Analytics were already in place for the AdMob Ad Network.
So, one of the design parameters for AdMob Analytics was to make it really simple to install and to address the issue of weight of the page. AdMob has been serving three billion ads a month, and our publishers require of us that we be low-latency. And our latency, based on benchmarking against the leaders from the Internet and the leaders from the mobile Web, is much lower. We’re pretty good at putting code on pages and not slowing down the page load. And when I say pretty good, I’m being humble.
Q: Advertising and search are intertwined. It’s a powerful combination and AdMob effectively has an in-house search engine of types in Taptap. Can you update me on where AdMob is with this and where it’s headed?
A: Search is an important part of the mobile environment.
Q: What’s next?
A: Monetization. We will continue to assist our publishers with monetization and ways to better their mobile properties.
BTW: Other vendors are welcome to contact me directly (or Andrea at andrea@msearchgroove.com). In fact, Dean Collins, who oversees U.S. business development for Amethon, has been particularly active in the blogosphere and made his case in this comment on MSG.
Disclaimer: AdMob and Bango are MSG supporters.
May 14th, 2008 at 10:14 am
[...] preparation for last week’s in-depth post on AdMob’s new mobile analytics tool, I also connected with Bango CEO Ray Anderson, who [...]