Bango, a leading mobile analytics company, recently conducted a survey of 550 mobile website owners to determine the most important mobile metrics through the eyes of the people it matters most to. What they found might be surprising to you.

It seems the most important analytical feature when it comes to mobile sites is determining the number of unique visitors overall. Not the device, the location of the user, the network, but simply the sheer number of unique visits. One would venture to guess that location, and device used would be the most important data to analyze, but Bango’s study showed that out of 550 site owners surveyed; 80% chose daily, weekly, and monthly unique visitor counts as most valuable in making decisions. Going down the line of most important after unique visitors, those surveyed deemed the following most important;

• Conversion rates/effectiveness of mobile marketing - 71%
• New/repeat visitors - 58%
• Information about the handsets your visitors use - 54%
• Location - 50%
• The mobile networks used by visitors to your mobile website - 41%

Accompanying the news of the survey, Bango has also introduced its revamped version of its robust mobile analytics platform, Bango Analytics v3.0, which aims to provide the two most important metrics; unique visitor counts, and conversion rates from mobile marketing campaigns. To accomplish its accuracy, Bango uses link tracking for campaign analysis and page tracking for overall site analysis.

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I often toss and turn at night wide-awake contemplating when I will next get my hands on more quantitative research in the area of mobile marketing. Occasionally I bustle about in my own mental mobile marketing meanderings like Sarah Jessica Parker considering her romantic dilemmas on HBO’s Sex and The City.

And if you think I’m kidding, just ask my wife.

Needless to say, you can always expect a fair share of feedback from me when a company delves into the juicy results of their research in this realm - whether it’s massaged for their benefit or not. Either way, there’s always something to be learned. Read the rest

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A difficult aspect of launching successful mobile campaigns is the fact that it’s hard to build a campaign that works between all devices, carriers, and other variables. Most mobile ad-agencies don’t have the in-house know-how to be able to produce a comprehensive campaign that will reach the masses.

Paris-based advertising holding company Publicis Groupe announced recently plans to partner with Yahoo to provide better mobile marketing offerings and a true all-in-one service to provide cross-device, and cross-carrier advertising worldwide.

They’ve integrated their mobile marketing agency, Phonevalley, with Yahoo’s Blueprint technology which is the backbone of Yahoo! Go. “Go” is a platform that supports widgets and third-party apps on mobile devices. Blueprint, in theory, allows developers to create an app once that can run on the Yahoo Go platform, which is then compatible with hundreds of phones around the world. Their intention with this is to provide brands working with Publicis the ability to tap into this capability, making it easier to develop one campaign that could work on various phones, carriers and across multiple countries.

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Canadian texters got up-in-thumbs recently when telecom company Telus Corp. unveiled new pricing that would start charging people without data plans to receive SMS messages. Up ’til now, users without bulk plans only had to pay for outgoing texts. Faced with having to now shell out for twice as many messages, the plan-less apparently cried outrage over the possibility of having to pay for spam SMS.

Due to the outcry (I’m guessing it went something like, “You hosers!”) Telus yesterday said it would give credit to customers for each spam message they receive. Complainants simply have to forward the offending SMS with the keyword “spam” to the shortcode 7726–which conveniently also spells out the word “spam.” They’ll then get credit for the 15 cents they’d have been charged to receive the text.

I’m not sure what to think of all this. The whole thing smacks of both greed and irrational fear on the part of Canadian consumers. Read the rest

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An article in Online Media Daily this morning discussed a new study that may surprise some of you out there. It discussed where venture capital funding has gone in the fist quarter of 2008 compared to last year. More specifically, where the money went in regards to Ad-Network, Social Media, and Mobile startups.

According to the latest M&A report lead by Petsky Prunier- social media and user-generated-content companies acquired nearly $1.5 billion in funding during the first quarter, which triples the amount received in the same quarter last year. Similarly, over $760 million was poured into ad network and exchange companies during the same time. When it comes to mobile-based companies and startups however, the numbers aren’t quite as motivating.

Holding companies and VC firms funneled just $80 million into mobile marketing firms during the first half of 2008. While substantial nonetheless, it’s down from $291 million last year at the same time when it was considered the number one technology-based investment sector of the year. As speculated by Scott Wiggins, managing director at Petsky Prunier;

“investors were perhaps hoping that ‘if you build it, they will come.’ But the infrastructure hasn’t facilitated its use.” Even the new 3G iPhone wouldn’t spark increased interest (or investments) from financiers in the short term.”

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Since I’ve recently covered open source SMS/WAP from Kannel, I thought I would mention another open source mobile project that I’ve had my eye on for a while.  Funambol is an open source development company focusing primarily on mobile 2.0 messaging applications, such as their popular open source push email and calendaring software.  They also offer one of the largest open source mobile development communities around today, appropriately dubbed Funambol Forge.

Back in March, Funambol introduced new “Code Sniper” projects into their development community that encouraged the development of mobile social networking applications.  Code Sniper is Funambol’s community program that rewards developers with monetary rewards to work on open source projects that benefit mobile users around the globe.  This new slate of Code Sniper projects ranges from syncing photos of friends on social networks to the address book on a mobile phone, to making it easy to invite your mobile contacts to join your favorite social network.  All of the apps developed as part of Code Sniper are made freely available under the standard open source licensing.

Though the applications that have already been developed are somewhat basic in their social networking functionality, it still shows what the future holds.  The market for this is only going to expand by leaps and bounds, and going the open source route is the way to go in my opinion.  Not only for the low cost, but also for the intense creativity of a worldwide group of developers that all share the same ultimate goal; killer mobile social networking applications.

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So Morgan Stanley recently raised expectations on Apple share prices based on the most optimistic iPhone forecast I think I’ve ever seen.

The investment bank believes that Apple will sell 27 million iPhones in the calendar year 2009, at an average price of $550 per unit. All this will raise Apple stock to $210 per share, the bank concludes.

Anyone else got a problem with this picture? Here are mine:

* The much-anticipated price reduction of $199 per 8-gigabyte phone. Even the 16-gig unit is $299. How Morgan Stanley estimates revenue of $550 per phone–even considering subsidies by AT&T–is a mystery.

* The 27 million units that Apple is expected to move. Sure, Nokia–the global handset leader–sold 14.5 million smart phones in the first quarter of this year, meaning anyone who dethrones the Scandinavians could sell something like 29 million units in a year (assuming the usurper has the same sales figures during all quarters involved) . But Apple reported selling 1.7 million units in Q12007 and 2.3 million units during the quarter prior. It would have to increase sales almost nine-fold to meet Morgan Stanley’s prediction. With certain issues still lingering over the iPhone, it doesn’t seem likely that Apple will toss Nokia off the mountain by next year.

* Investors elsewhere don’t seem to share Morgan Stanley’s optimism. Consider that when the cheaper, 3G iPhone debuted last week, shares fell 2.2 percent. Even today, Apple shares closed down 2.7 percent at $178.75.

What do you all think?

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