(cross posted from our Mobile Web Analytics blog)

In an article recently from BusinessWeek, Olga Kharif points out the issues that advertisers are having with the transparency of mobile ad networks.

Advertisers are shying away from mobile phones until they get clearer data on whether promotions on the small screen pay off

We have 2 main objectives that will determine if Mobilytics is indeed a successful product. The first being a simple web analytics tool to get an overall detailed picture of visitors and customers. We take this for granted on the Internet, and there is no reason we can’t have the same and more on the mobile web.

The second objective is to allow advertisers and publisher to track what’s going on with their campaigns. The ad networks right now do not share enough information, and it is difficult for advertisers to track end to end promotions to sales and conversions. It is also difficult to compare side by side ad campaigns from different ad networks and publishers.

Complicating matters, what little data the wireless service providers do pass back to advertisers varies widely in terms of what they measure. Mobile-advertising networks, in turn, crunch the disparate data in different ways to gauge the audience response to ads. One ad network might report the number of phones that received an ad, while another might report how many users actually viewed the ad. The distinction is subtle, but important for advertisers. Without a consistent yardstick, it’s hard to compare the results of a campaign that ran through Yahoo’s ad-placement business with one placed by a rival network such as AdMob.

Mobilytics is being built to be a tool that can leave the ad network out of the decision as to what data to share with the advertiser. With proper campaign coding, detailed information to be used across publishers is easily possible.

We are that consistent yardstick that is needed in the industry. The only way to measure correctly will be with a third-party tool that provides common metrics across publishers.

In the end, ad agencies find themselves creating complex spreadsheets in a bid to reconcile the data from various campaigns. “They are doing more manual processing of data than strategic planning for their clients,” says Scott Ferris, a senior vice-president at Microsoft (MSFT), which has been testing software to help agencies compare mobile-ad data from different sources.

Building manual spreadsheets is not the answer. It still uses bad input data. Using Mobilytics and our API we can provide all the data needed to determine the success of mobile ad campaigns.

MobiAd news has a great post about the article here as well.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 8:17 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.