It’s that time of the month again, Millennial Media has released its Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach and Targeting (S.M.A.R.T) for February 2010, outlining growth in the mobile Web with an emphasis on mobile fundraising and its audience’s demographics.

First, some context; Nielsen reports the US mobile Web grew by 4 percent in January, from 67M to 69.6M users, while Millennial Media’s US unique audience reach increased by 6.88 percent in January, from 54.3M to 58.1M unique users month over month, representing an 83 percent reach of the mobile Web.  Nielsen’s top 25 sites include 11 from Millennial Media’s network.

In terms of mobile calls-to-action, Millennial reports “Application Download” and “Place Call” represented the top two in February, with 31 percent and 29 percent of total calls-to-action respectively.  In addition, the network has identified “Subscribe Purchase,” “M-Commerce” and “Store Locator” as campaign actions that offer the most mobile-specific benefit to advertisers, such as location-based advertising (LBA) to drive consumers to local stores.  Interestingly, “Site Search” and “Social Media” came in last in terms of call-to-action use.

Smartphones continue to grow in usage, with a 2 percent growth in US impression share in February to 61 percent of total impressions on Millennial’s network.  Feature phones, however, continue to decline, with a 2 percent drop to 39 percent of total network impressions.

Apple’s OS continues to dominate in the US smartphone OS mix, representing 72 percent of total impressions, while RIM comes in at a distant second with 13 percent.  Android remains small at just 3 percent, however Android impressions experienced the largest month over month increase, with a 25.3 percent change.

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AdMob, in its latest Mobile Metrics Report for January 2010, focused on how consumers are interacting with mobile apps on the four major platforms; iPhone, iPod Touch, Android and WebOS.

In addition to the normal metrics AdMob reports on, last month’s special section included an opt-in survey of consumers on iPhone, iPod touch, Android and webOS devices to learn more about how they are engaging and interacting with applications.  The survey included 963 respondents across all of the platforms and revealed some interesting points on app purchasing habits.

iPhone and Android users download a similar number of apps on a monthly basis, with each platform producing around 8.8 apps downloaded per month by its users.  Of the total apps, 7 out of every 8.8 downloads were free apps on the iPhone, compared to 7.6 out of 8.7 on Android devices- indicating that iPhone users are more prone to paying for apps over Android users.

The iPod Touch, however, produces 12.1 app downloads per month on average by its users, with 10.5 being free apps.  Interestingly enough, the report indicates that iPod Touch users download 37% more apps on average than iPhone and Android users.  WebOS users download roughly 5.7 apps per month on average, with 5.1 being free apps, indicating that WebOS users are far more apt to downloading free apps over paid apps, likely because of a much smaller selection over Apple/Android app stores.

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Millennial Media, coming off yet another strong growth year in 2009, announced this morning that its acquired San Francisco-based TapMetrics, a mobile analytics startup focused on application usage and user behavior.

Focusing on mobile apps, TapMetrics allows developers to analyze all aspects of their applications- tracking analytics, reviews, revenue, and more from a simple Online dashboard.  The company’s offerings fit well within Millennial’s thriving development community, and will provide developers with a unique insight into how their apps are performing.

“The market has recognized Millennial Media as the leader in mobile advertising.  As a result of their deep commitment to advertisers, they deliver the best business partnership and monetization for mobile companies – particularly developers,” said Chris Brown, Co-Founder and CEO, TapMetrics. “What is exciting to us is that Millennial Media now has the only scalable solution for developers that doesn’t contain an operating system bias, making Millennial Media the natural partner for us.”

With the inclusion of TapMetrics, Millennial can now offer developers capabilities such as real-time analytics, user interaction data, feature and version adoption, device types, crash reporting, review tracking and a competitive ratings system, while integrating seamlessly with Millennial’s existing solutions.

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With news coming out of Barcelona — and the industry in general — being focused heavily on mobile apps, Bango has released some interesting stats related to mobile Web usage, proving that while apps are indeed a rapidly growing segment, the mobile browser remains the most important app on any mobile device.

Over the last 12 months, Bango has been analyzing traffic to a range of mobile Websites by sampling across 50 million phone users worldwide who have accessed third party mobile sites through its platform.  In the end, Bango realized a 600% growth in traffic, representing six times the amount of traffic recorded the previous 12-month period.

Interestingly, the average time on site was measured as 3 minutes, 21 seconds- averaged across user visits to all sites, compared with just over one and half minutes the previous year.  The analysis also measured the average number of pages viewed per visit at 5 pages, up from just over 2 pages per visit twelve months before.  These site-level figures have increased by an average of 230% compared to a year ago, with consumers visiting sites more frequently from their phones and browsing more pages over longer periods of time.  The key categories for mobile browsing are news, sports and general media sites (including newspapers), mobile content downloads, social networking and retail sites.

Bango attributes the continued growth in mobile Web usage primarily to smartphone usage, with Blackberry accounting for over 17% of the mobile devices recorded across sites.  The number of visits by BlackBerry users also exceeds any other device, including the iPhone.  Factoring in the relative sales growth across the different smartphone brands the data suggests that iPhone browsing has, if anything, slightly declined per user measured, which could be a result of consumers being directed towards apps instead of websites.

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So far, there’s been a lot of emphasis placed on wireless carriers during this year’s MWC, with numerous solutions tailored specifically for wireless operators and their need for everything from network optimization to mobile content distribution.  Openwave is continuing that trend, with its debut of “Openwave Analytics, Data Mediation Edition (DME),” which aims to help operators effectively monitor, manage and monetize mobile data traffic.

Openwave Analytics DME enables operators to gain “detailed network and usage related insights across a wide array of operator data sources,” or in other words, allows carriers to know exactly how users are interacting with their network to better leverage various opportunities.  The solution also allows operators to seamlessly insert this intelligence into their control points in the network and mobile ecosystem, allowing them to stay focused on providing the ability to build rich profiles and segments and leverage insights into new revenue streams.

The solution is fueled by real-time analytics that provides early identification of mobile data trends that enable operators to make timely decisions to avoid bandwidth problems while targeting business driving opportunities.  To make it happen, the platform mediates among all different ecosystem elements, enabling the enhancement of every mode of IP traffic, including mobile internet, messaging, video and social networking.

Startups and solution-providers have recognized the deficiencies present with wireless operators, and have begun to offer solutions targeted directly to solving those shortcomings.  As the mobile ecosystem has evolved, the real innovation has lied in third-party providers, not the carriers, and those providers are now trying to bolster the networks that fuel their products and services by offering specifically targeted solutions such as Openwave Analytics DME.  Whether operators will make use of such solutions is yet to be seen.

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I’ve had an on-going rant, along with most of the mobile advertising industry, regarding a lack  of truly usable mobile analytics solutions that allow for a comprehensive insight into how campaigns are performing.  Though many solutions exist, most fall short in providing the right toolset to get the job done.

Today, Motally has debuted the closest thing yet to bring a sense of centralization to the mix, with its introduction of import/export APIs to its analytics solution.  The addition allows publishers to have maximum control over their metrics by allowing them to integrate directly into or out of existing systems, such as Omniture or any other.

What’s interesting, is in addition to export APIs, Motally’s new import APIs allows for the uploading of bulk data directly to Motally for processing, making it especially useful for platform providers who want to send large quantities of data for analysis on behalf of their user base – something that’s been needed and requested for a long time.  The import API can also be used by developers to send data to Motally for processing from non-natively supported platforms – effectively increasing coverage to a broader range of development platforms.

This development is significant not only because it provides the liberation of metric data across multiple platforms via APIs, but because Motally already offers such comprehensive reporting across iPhone, Android, Blackberry, the mobile Web and even the iPad in one interface.  Being able to tie-in metric data from other ad-networks and analytics solutions into Motally’s already robust platform makes for a powerful solution never before available.  Motally has beaten Flurry and even Google to the punch with its import/export APIs.

The problem of producing a fully comprehensive mobile measurement solution will never truly be solved, at least not in the near future, but data liberation via APIs is a major first step in making it a reality.

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In an announcement by the GSMA and comScore today, the two have announced what they’re calling the “first, industry standard metrics for mobile advertising.”  Though it looks to be a valiant attempt, it seems to miss the mark in terms of addressing the true needs of mobile advertisers.

Based on the UK mobile market for starters, the metrics are based on anonymous browsing data gathered from all five UK operators’ subscriber bases.  These behavioural metrics are complemented by some basic demographic data collected on an opt-in basis from a small panel of mobile users.  The collective data from all carriers is then centralized to allow advertisers to view data without fragmentation.

The move was said to address the lack of standardized metrics for measuring audience engagement, which is no doubt a huge problem in the realm of mobile advertising, but doesn’t address the big picture, or account for metrics stemming from integrated ad-networks and existing analytics solutions.  The GSMA admits this only a first step, but at least the industry in moving in the right direction and addressing arguably the largest problem facing mobile advertisers – a lack of truly comprehensive measurement.

This move also signals the many roadblocks the industry will face in trying to develop such comprehensive measurement techniques.  The GSMA has been laying the foundations for mobile metrics for the past eighteen months, for example, including looking at security and technical issues, as well as working with regulatory authorities and other industry bodies such as the MMA and IAB to ensure a coherent approach.

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