Tracking is one of the most important aspects of any marketing campaign. One of the joys of mobile is the sheer amount of information that you can track, if you set up your campaigns correctly. Tracking, also sometimes referred to as analytics, is the process of capturing and evaluating the performance of your marketing campaigns. Different tracking and analytics platforms can be put in place to capture information about the success of your campaign. Before you get deeply into the discussion of what mobile tacking options are available, here are some points to keep in mind:
• In my opinion, you should never spend more on your analytics platform than you do on your analysts. As a consultant, I have seen many companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on expensive analytics platforms, but with no dedicated personnel who are qualified to review or interpret the data. In many cases, these companies simply use the platforms to generate simple automated reports that review very basic success metrics. If you are not diving deeply into your metrics on a regular basis, many of the free solutions should fulfill your needs.
• With mobile marketing, it is very important to understand how the tracking system works and what exactly it is reporting on. Some platforms are much better than others about telling you exactly what
different statistics mean. Never take statistics for granted or assume that you know what they mean or how they were collected.
• Even the best data is slightly "spongy" and inexact. This is simply because a variety of different technological issues or circumstances can cause a reporting suite to interpret data the way it does. I generally recommend that companies use more than one reporting suite whenever possible, because it can help you get a clearer idea of what is actually happening—and it's also good to have a back-up reporting suite, in case something happens to the other one. Generally, one paid service and one free service is fine.
• Begin with the end in mind. When you are shopping for different tracking and analytics platforms, you should already know what type of information you will need available, how you will want to segment it, and what decisions that information will be expected to inform.
Some of the more common methods of mobile tracking are included next. The different methods and metrics are also covered in more depth in each of the chapters dedicated to that particular aspect of mobile marketing. It is important to note that the following suggestions are just some the most common tracking options; feel free to be more creative when developing your tracking scheme.
