This morning I received the 3rd AdMob Mobile Metrics report. Since AdMob has been serving a tremendous amount of impressions globally, they have been putting together this report of what appears to be some useful information on the market in general.

But is it?

First, let me point out that AdMob themselves understand that the info may not be as representative of the market as you might think. They have included this disclaimer in the report.

Limits of this Data

Representativeness – AdMob does not claim that this information will be necessarily representative of the mobile Internet as a whole or of any particular country or market.

AdMob’s traffic is driven by publisher relationships and may be influenced accordingly. Because the data is pulled across ads served on more than 2,500 sites, we feel the data will be useful and may help inform your business decision making.

Ad Request Classification – For some handsets and operator networks, it is difficult to collect full handset data. AdMob categorizes these requests as”unclassified” and does not serve targeted ads to these requests. Unclassified data has been omitted from the handset data in this report. Approximately 2% of requests are unclassified by geography and approximately 11% of requests are unclassified by handset

Don’t get me wrong. I think the mobile world is a better place with this info, and I appreciate them sharing it with us. I just wonder if we can use it for anything.

The main issue is that they are tracking statistics only on sites that advertise with them. So the first question is whether this is a good representation of the complete mobile web landscape.

For example, they show the United States far exceeding any other country with 725 million impressions. So all that really tells us is that Admob publishers are mostly in the U.S. It doesn’t tell us that the U.S. serves more mobile web pages than any other country.  China, Japan, Korea, and other  countries are not listed at all. Does that mean they don’t use the mobile web, or that they are just not using AdMob?

With the November report, they have included month-over-month stats. Unfortunately this info has too many variables. While actual visitors and impressions might be up, AdMob is also signing up new publishers and advertisers. In the U.S. they show impressions to be up from 1,858,008 in September to 6,646,601 in November. What can we learn from this info? Is it just a comparison of the same sample of sites, or does it include new publishers? Are these publishers also advertisers? Did they spend more in October and November to advertise the sites and bring in more traffic?

It would be great be able to really get a picture of the global mobile web the way we do on the Internet. For now this will have to do, and the information is much appreciated.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 9:48 am and is filed under Mobile Advertising, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Web, Mobile Web Analytics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.