Some of the top mobile-specific Web analytics platforms are described here, along with their services and offerings:
• AdMob—AdMob has historically been the gold standard in mobile analytics (see Figure 3.8). The company began as a mobile advertising company and offered comprehensive analytics to help their advertisers understand how well their campaigns were performing. People found the analytics information so valuable that AdMob began offering the platform for free to anyone with a mobile website.
AdMob will also provide statistics for traditional Web visits when any website is visited, but it is intended specifically for mobile analytics. As you can see in Figure 3.8, the AdMob platform lets you filter information by specific dates and shows information such as visits, pages views, page views per visit, and time spent on the site. It also shows information such as which carrier is sending the most traffic and what the most popular location or activity is on the site.
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• Bango—Bango is one of the most well-known mobile analytics programs because it has been around for longer than most of its competitors (see Figure 3.9). As with most mobile analytics platforms, Bango can track activity on both mobile only and traditional websites. It tracks basic Web statistics, such as visits, new and unique visitors, page views, page views per visit, time on site, and conversions.
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Bango can track both mobile-only and traditional website traffic.
Bango Analytics considers itself a real-time reporting solution because it can report on any action that happens on your website within the hour. This can be very important if you are in the midst of a short-term or location-specific promotion, because it provides the capability to tailor different aspects of your campaign on the fly and respond to different statistics as they become available.
One of the most important features Bango offers is the capability to track individual users' behaviors, whether they are connecting via a mobile network or WiFi, even if the connection changes during the interaction (see Figure 3.10). Each mobile device is attached a unique ID, which makes it much easier to segment specific users by their behavior, to import information about specific customers into a customer relationship management (CRM) system, or to integrate it with a loyalty campaign.
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As with most analytics platforms, Bango enables you to filter your data by page, country, operator, device, time, or date, but it also can monitor and pass URL-based tracking parameters to help supplement native functionality or launch new campaigns quickly.
One of the nice features of Bango is that it warehouses all the raw data that it collects about your website instead of batching it into a one-time report, sending it, and then eliminating it from its server. That means you can continually drill down into historical data, or potentially even create custom metrics from the warehoused information.
Bango's analytics program is quite robust in term of working and integrating with other traditional Web analytics programs though APIs. This is nice because it enables you to consolidate your traditional and mobile data without having to hand-stitch two disparate sets of data together. As shown in Figure 3.11, Bango can use the API to work directly within other reporting suites, such as Omniture, or even proprietary internal tracking systems.
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• Mobilytics—Mobilytics is a comprehensive mobile tracking suite that includes a lot of the basic features. It includes all the traditional Web metrics, such as visits, unique and new visitors, page views, pages per visit, time on site, and goal and conversion tracking. Mobilytics also has configurable dashboards that enable you to edit how data is presented to you. It also provides the capability to segment traffic based on a variety of different factors, including but not limited to reporting on traffic source, search engine, search term, carriers, countries, phone models, phone manufacturer, and phone capability. The platform can also be used to report on mobile PPC campaigns and mobile ads.
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