Mobile Analytics

Mobile Analytics: Measuring Campaign Success

Class 18

Mobile Analytics

What Is Mobile Analytics?Device, Connection and ContentKeys to an Effective Mobile Strategy:1.Don’t treat mobile as a stand-alone strategy2.Your mobile strategy has to be integrated into your overall marketing campaign3.Understand the daily activities and lifestyles of users4.Find the “in-between” times in peoples lives to target ad messages5.Know how and where consumers interact with friends, family and businesses

Mobile Analytics

A Framework for Mobile AnalyticsUnderstanding Engagement• Mobile analytics shares many terms and concepts that are familiar to marketers who have experience with online analytics. • A smartphone and a desktop computer can both access the web and find the same content using a browser built by the same company. The same metric reported for a desktop user does not mean the same as it would for a mobile user. • The key to this difference is in understanding how the context and capabilities of mobile interact with consumer behavior. • The most important difference is the nature of consumer engagement, which is heavily influenced by the intimacy and personal nature of mobile. • At the heart of mobile analytics is an understanding of this engagement.

Mobile Analytics

Creating a Mobile StrategyMobile Apps• “There’s an app for that…”• You must have a thorough understanding of your audience• The best way to use apps is to create something useful and valuable• Apps must be functional such as a calculator • Entertaining such as a video, game or music• Provide some sort of social connectedness, such as an for a app for a user community • Location aware apps are driving growth in retail, entertainment and travel• Monetize apps by offer free versions or subscriptions

Mobile Analytics

Creating a Mobile Strategy

Mobile Analytics

Challenges to Mobile AnalyticsImplementing analytics across mobile is hampered by data silos The variety of data available in the mobile ecosystem necessarily brings with it a high level of complexity. SMS, mobile web, app behavior data, app store data, location-based data, mobile ad and QR code data all tend to reside in separate data silos. Breaking down these silos will help in numerous ways: • Creating a more integrated way to report mobile web and mobile ad data will create an analytics capability much more similar to what is available with online analytics • Uniting available app behavior data with mobile web data will make for easier mobile web/app comparisons • Standardized access and reporting of location information will make available mobile web, app, or ad data more valuable • Developing analytics packages designed with OPEN APIs that allow for the simple import of other key mobile data

Mobile Analytics

Challenges to Mobile AnalyticsTagging and tracking users remains a technical hurdle• Tagging and tracking mobile user behavior is essential to collecting analytics, but it is a still-developing mobile capability • JavaScript is a standard tagging mechanism, but this is only effective for smartphones capable of handling JavaScript and completely omits feature phones.• This is becoming more common as users switch to smartphones with “modern” mobile OS browsers – iOS, Android, and Windows Phone browsers – which all support JavaScript.• Pixel-based tracking has been introduced as a solution for non-JavaScript enabled devices but is not yet standard practice.• Third party cookies, the bread and butter of online tracking, are not supported by many platforms, or are turned off by default, as on iOS, making comprehensive web tracking more difficult

Mobile Analytics

Challenges to Mobile AnalyticsRegional and national differences impact technical capabilities and regulations• There are regional considerations to keep in mind when implementing mobile analytics programs• Due to network and local infrastructure, what may be technically or legally possible in one country may not be possible in another• Europe is much more restrictive then the U.S. with mobile privacy• Each country has its own privacy and data collection regulations that determine what can and cannot be done to contextually enable relevant programs

Mobile Analytics

Challenges to Mobile AnalyticsPrivacy remains a paramount issue • Consumers expect that some information will be collected about their activities, but this needs to be balanced with the tenets of privacy – providing consumers transparency, notice, and choice. • While the mobile marketing industry works to create a self-regulatory approach around these tenets, brand marketers and their media and analytics partners must be mindful of the most challenging tenet, choice, and the control that consumers must be able to exert with any mobile device. • A key issue here is that many analytics suppliers aggregate data and use it for other purposes.• In this model, a marketer’s data is truly not it’s own and it is often being resold for a variety of purposes. Brands need to take great precautions to insure that their data remains private because changes in these privacy laws could leave many of them dangerously exposed.