Mobile phone ad platform provider AdMob has launched AdMob Mobile Analytics, a Google Analytics style service for mobile advertising.
AdMob Mobile Analytics offers businesses a free solution to maximize commerce, advertising and content on the mobile Internet. AdMob Mobile Analytics helps mobile site owners understand their audience, optimize their content and improve usability. The suite allows users to track site performance metrics such as unique visitors, duration of visit, page performance, as well as user details including geography, operator and device specifics. This information helps mobile site owners tune their sites to the specific consumers visiting their mobile Web presence.
Notably, the service is ad provider agnostic: users can track campaigns by any provider as well as ad campaigns from AdMob.
“..track ..user details including geography, operator and device specifics”
I am *dying* to hear how this works!
The only data a mobile website gets from almost all mobile devices is the gateway the mobile device came in through which ID’s the wireless carrier.
The magic for allegedly pinpointing the device’s “home” geography is particularly fascinating.. since no ANI (mostly worthless anyhow) is sent, what spectacular technology has been discovered to overcome this, pray tell?
As to device specifics.. Is there some brand new “User Agent” protocol in development that sends the phone’s make/model data, also?
Bill Burke
http://wireless...ch.blogspot.com
Just Perfect ! This is the only company that can kick Google’s ass in Mobile world.
Can’t wait for this. Google was supposed to solve this but they didn’t really get their shit together in time. Admob shows again that they are the most relevant mobile ad network. Awesome work!
I’d like to find out how that works too, just signed up for the beta to try it out on my site.
I presume they’ll be dishing out PHP / Perl / Python code to be installed on your server-side pages, which sends the headers and IP to their server.
Contrast this to Amethon, which sniffs for client traffic on your network, but is not free.
As to device specifics.. Is there some brand new “User Agent” protocol in development that sends the phone’s make/model data, also?
Isn’t that what the User-Agent in the HTTP headers is?
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.brys...obile-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
Dean.Collins@Amethon.com
Phone: +1 646-240-4043
@5: No. The mobile internet is bizarro-world. The http user agent may mention the browser version, but not the phone model. The ip address might be the mobile service provider’s gateway (remember, your phone’s on your provider’s network, not the internet) — but might not. Forget about learning anything useful from wap clients (are these still in use?) altogether.
@2 (Ghaus ) “….Just Perfect ! This is the only company that can kick Google’s ass in Mobile world.”
Are you sure about that?
JBug
PRNewsExpress.com
this is a barn burner!
Yes, its possible to identify devices by device header.
Have a look at http://www.bango.com/analytics for a Mobile Analytics product that has been around for a while now.
Hi Bill,
No magic to handset brand/model analysis or mobile operator identification, just hard work.
To identify the handset brand, model and relevant capabilities such as screen resolution, you simply feed the User Agent Profile string to a database such as WURFL.
To identify the mobile operator from the gateway address, you simply build a database of the IP addresses and the corresponding operator and country.
At least, that is how we do…
Cheers,
Michael Stone
Amethon Solutions