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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Like Millennial Media’s monthly S.M.A.R.T report, Opera’s monthly “State of the Mobile Web” report gives an inside snapshot of how the mobile Web is being consumed around the world and how users are interacting with mobile as seen from one of the most widely used mobile browsers in existence.

In November’s report, released today, usage has once again skyrocketed over the previous month and November of last year with Opera reporting a total of 41.7 million users — more than double the amount of users in November of 2008 — and a 5.3 percent increase over October 2009.

Opera users viewed 18.8 billion pages in November, a 231 percent increase over the previous year, and generated over 285 million MB of data for operators worldwide.  It’s interesting to note that Opera compresses up to 90 percent of the data used by consumers, so without this compression, users would have viewed over 2.6 PB (petabytes) of data in November.  Overall data traffic was up 213 percent over November 2008, showing just how much the mobile Web has matured over the past year.

This month’s report also highlighted mobile Web usage and reach in Africa, where usage has grown exponentially over the previous year.  Ghana and Kenya, for example, lead the top 10 African countries in terms of page-view growth — 4,348.6% and 615.4%, respectively — while Ghana and Ivory Coast lead the top 10 African countries in growth of unique users-1,558.8% and 330.2%, respectively.  Kenya also leads the top 10 African countries in page views, with each user browsing 525 pages on average each month.

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Millennial Media’s S.M.A.R.T Report, or Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach & Targeting, provides a nice glimpse into the world of mobile advertising on a month-to-month basis to track changes and highlight trends as seen from one of the largest mobile ad-networks in the US.

Along with the normal metrics, November’s report highlighted consumer behavior trends over Thanksgiving and the days following, giving an interesting overview of how people interacted with the mobile Web over the holiday weekend.

Interestingly, the report highlights the fact that the CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) and food ad vertical showed mobile interaction lifts for recipes two days prior to Thanksgiving and again on Thanksgiving day when people were searching for last minute recipe tips.  Subsequently, a 31 percent lift in interaction rates within the CPG/food vertical was reported on November 24th, compared to month-to-date data through November 23rd.

Even more interesting was in the restaurant/fast food category, where an interaction lift of 51 percent was observed on November 27th, the day after Thanksgiving and Black Friday.  While the masses were out shopping, the subsequent result was an influx of mobile use presumably researching restaurants and finding coupons while on-the-go.

A surprising insight was also observed in terms of mobile dating.  Interaction rates spiked 19 percent over Thanksgiving weekend, providing a perfect opportunity for marketers in this particular niche vertical.

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Opera has released its monthly “State of the Mobile Web” report for September, and like usual, it paints an excellent picture of where the mobile Web currently stands- from the perspective of one of the most popular mobile browsers in use today.

This month’s report outlines the typical growth in all categories including pageviews, data transfered, overall users and more, but also includes the bold statement that Opera is saving mobile consumers over $8 billion per year in data-usage charges (based on their mobile data compression technology) – more on that later.

In terms of users, more than 35.6 million people used Opera Mini last month- an 11.5 percent jump over August ‘09 and more than 150 percent compared to September ‘08.  Opera introduced the first beta of Opera Mini 5 last month and reports two major milestones in terms of sheer usage- Opera’s mobile browsers facilitated more than 500 million pageviews per day, on average, and processed a hefty 2 petabytes of data via its servers in one month’s time.  To put it in perspective, 2 petabytes is equal to 2,000 terabytes (TBs).

Because of Opera’s compression technology, which is estimated to compress up to 90 percent of the data to save network bandwidth, the company says users in the top 10 countries (Russia, Indonesia, India, China, Ukraine, South Africa, United States, United Kingdom, Poland and Vietnam) save up to $672 million USD per month, or over $8.1 billion USD per year, thanks to the compression rate of 90% and the subsequent savings in mobile data charges from users’ wireless providers.

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As mobile marketing continues to get traction there are some important trends we can watch to see mobile marketing begin to settle into life in the mainstream.

1.
Mobile Integrated Events
Mobile marketing and events are a perfect match – a crowd of people contained in one location with a common purpose or interest. It is an important trend that more and more events are being integrated with mobile because everyone in the audience then becomes one more person who has been exposed to mobile marketing and will then be more likely to participate in the future. It helps it become normal.

Although I am not a big fan of watching the national political conventions (I think they’ve strayed too far from democracy and turned into being all about publicity, but that’s another story) it is impossible to not hear about what’s going on there.

The 3AM VP candidate announcement via text message aside, what I found very interesting at the Democratic National Convention was the interactive text screen. Delegates could use their cell phones to send text message comments that would show up on a big screen for everyone to see. I particularly enjoyed Dianne Sawyer on Good Morning America talking about how this would happen. She sounded like she was telling us that we had landed on the moon. By the next convention cycle in four years this technology will be so ingrained in our culture it won’t even be worth a mention.
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Normally I do a Monthly roundup so with the new year I think it’s appropriate to post an annual roundup though I’ll file it under the monthly roundup tag OK? If you’re new to MMW then you don’t know that this blog is less than a year old and my involvement really got started in June. So, to that end here are some of the traffic stats and top stories. Oh and these aren’t huge numbers but so what. All blogs have one undisputable thing in common… we all started with no traffic or readers whatsoever.

Visits

• March – 672
• April – 3,140
• May – 2,766
• June – 3,814
• July – 3,569
• August – 3,943
• September – 6,251
• October – 9,485
• November – 9,576
• December – 10,180

Page Views

• March – 3,379
• April – 7,751
• May – 6,881
• June – 15,992
• July – 21,343
• August – 24,255
• September – 38,581
• October – 66,050
• November – 57,676
• December – 61,231

Referrals

• March – 194
• April – 525
• May – 569
• June – 891
• July – 904
• August – 1,133
• September – 2,013
• October – 4,444
• November – 5,794
• December – 6,178

Top 10 Referring Sites

• Google – 6,399
• Stumble Upon – 5,463
• Windows Live – 2,660
• Google Images – 613
• Google Cache – 198
• Yahoo – 196
• MSN Search – 170
• AOL – 35
• Delicious – 25
• Ask – 20

Other weird and interesting tidbits.

• This blog was read from 109 different Countries which has enabled me to make new contacts in 9 different Countries.
• Tuesday, on average is my largest bandwidth day.
• Wednesday, on average is the day with the largest page view average.
• The busiest reading hours are 5AM, 11AM-1PM and 11PM (note to self… post just before peak reading times to get the most eyeballs).
• I published this blog post at 10:56PM. Come and get it
• The Yahoo Slurp bot crawls this blog more than any other robot by far yet it doesn’t translate into noticeable traffic. Why is that Yahoo? Heck, I bought a Directory listing, show me some love will ya.
• The average user session is 7 minutes 31 seconds.
• 80% of you are using a Windows operating system.
• Less than 3% of you are using Linux.
• 1.5% of you are using an Apple (my Dad is one of em).
• 47% of you are using an IE browser.
• 38% of you are cruising with FireFox.
• 5,054 spam comments were stopped by the Akismet Spam Filter.
• Because this post contains the word Vacation or Light Posting in the title the spam bots have relentlessly attacked it with 1,356 attempts at comment spam. All of it was automatically trapped by Akisment! Thanks Automattic!
• In October I hired SoloStream to make this blog over, they did a superb job. Given the need I’d hire them again without question.
• Counting this post there are now 263 blog posts and 326 comments.

Top 5 Pages Viewed

• http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/ – 71,043
• http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/66/can-a-mobile-device-cause-a-revolution/ – 3,928
• http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/72/why-sites-like-jumptap-are-a-marketers-dream/ – 2,606
• http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/165/blueapple-mobile-video-search/ – 2,184
• http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/181/lease-your-own-mobile-sms-marketing-platform/ – 1,113

Things I didn’t do that I said I’d do.

• Send Jeff Judge his Mobile Marketing Watch shirt. It’s sitting right in my Desk.
• Review Giffs Mobile Messaging Service and Company.

Reasons why? My fault entirely, I’ll try harder to follow through better in 2008.

Lastly, as of this writing there are 306 readers. So thanks to you the reader, I really appreciate your support!Â

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Goodbye November, hello December! November was a funky Month and I’m glad it’s behind me. I was extremely busy, Google dinged my page rank for no reason, the Berggren triumvirate (daughter, wife, me) all got colds and sick at one point or another. Oh, and my wife was bitten by a dog to top it all off.

I declared in November that I was going to lose 43lbs and so I’ve been spending 3 to 4 days a week with a personal trainer (my trainer) and running on my off days. I set a goal to get under 190lbs from my current weight of 232lbs. To make it happen I had to make some diet and time adjustments. My time with the trainer comes before anything that I’m not doing with my Family which means I’ll be a little slower putting words into the blog while I’m cranking out the push-ups and stuff.

If you’re looking to hire a personal trainer and you’re serious about sticking with it let me give you a tip on negotiating price. If you know for certain that you’re truly serious then talk to the trainer about bulk discounts before agreeing to price… like pre-pay for 35 to 50 sessions with 50% down and 50% at the half way mark. I saved $27 per session plus I took advantage of another special to snag 3 more free sessions.

The blog was slower than I expected but taking 9 days off had a lot to do with that. Considering that I was dinged by Google and only posted 18 times the blog actually showed growth in almost all categories with the exception of Google Referrals and Page Views. I normally hit nearly 40 posts per month. Here’s some of those details:

• 22% increase in unique visitors
• 13% decline in page views
• 30% increase in referrals (yeah baby, who needs Google page rank!)
• 26% increase in readers
• 20% increase in inbound links to the blog (over 1,100 now)

For some reason this page got stumbled hard last Month, it received 2,700+ stumbles. SadPanda says that I’m getting paid from JumpTap for this article. Your wrong SadPanda. JumpTap doesn’t know me from a can of paint and I don’t get paid to write about the companies I cover; says so right here under this little thing called Full Disclosure.

Here are the top 10 blog posts viewed in November.

• Can A Mobile Device Cause A Revolution
• Why Sites Like JumpTap Are A Marketers Dream
• Blue Apple Mobile Video Search
• 35 Ways To Test Your Mobile Web Site
• EBay Hops Aboard The SMS Train
• I’m Looking For Mobile Marketing Firms
• Mobilize Your Blog In 5 Minutes Or Less With MoFuse
• SMS Based Schedule Reminder Service
• Can Mobile Benefit From The Kleiner Perkins Decision
• Remember That Linux Question I Had

November marked the first Month that my readers used FireFox more than Internet Explorer, 45.6% of you read my blog with FireFox and 41.9% of you are using IE. One of you is rockin the web and reading my blog with an Amiga system, cool!

Last but not least, thanks… to the readers. I really appreciate your continued readership!

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