One of the biggest benefits to mobile marketing is that it enables you to add a direct response to all your traditional media campaigns, making them immediately trackable. Other chapters discuss this kind of tracking in much more depth, but basically this requires a text-messaging prompt in the offline marketing message, as shown in Figure
SMS call to action in traditional media makes it immediately track-able.
The best way to use mobile marketing to track traditional media marketing efforts is to utilize different response codes in different campaigns. For instance, in the Sponsor A Dog campaign, which was run throughout the London Tube, a poster in one location told people in one place to text "DOG" to the short code, and different posters told people in another location to text something else, such as "DOGS," "PUP," or "LOVE," to the short code. This strategy presegments the data, making it easier to understand where your campaigns are succeeding and where they are not, to prioritize future ad placement.
All the top text message and phone system providers will be able to either provide statistics about your campaign or, ideally, provide an analytics platform that you can use to evaluate and segment the data on your own.
Within the platform, you can also segment responses by the time of day or the area code associated with the response. If you include clickable phone numbers in any of your marketing efforts or promotions, you can track the response in a similar way, providing different phone numbers with different promotions so that tracking the success of each initiative or each location is simple.
Offline behavior can also track the effectiveness of a mobile marketing campaign. This is especially true in the case of mobile coupons and redemption codes, when a promotion is sent to a mobile device, but the trackable behavior actually happens when the coupon is redeemed in the store. You can segment your users in a variety of ways and then track their response. One of the most common tests is to send recipients in different zip codes different redemption codes, and then systematically evaluate how far your customers drive to redeem the coupon. This kind of analysis can help inform a company's decision to open a new location.
Loyalty Tracking
One of the most important and complex opportunities in mobile tracking is the capability to track a multichannel marketing effort in a unified way. A comprehensive multichannel effort includes a variety of on- and offline media, including print, TV, radio, email, location-based mobile marketing, SMS, MMS, applications, billboards and banners, and Web traffic. The following companies can help you set up and track a multichannel marketing campaign.
Unica
One of the top analytics companies for drawing all types of analytics information together is Unica. Figure 3.20 shows Unica's capability to segment customers by their loyalty status and show the value of each segment.
The system has a variety of different products and unique feature that enable you to anticipate opportunities to cross-sell customers when they will be most interested in your products, based on their previous behavior and see a visual representation of your customer data. The system helps you manage customers' different touch-points and determine, in real time, which messages will be the most compelling and successful.
The Unica dashboard enables you to segment customers by loyalty.
mobileStorm
In addition to their email and SMS solution, mobileStorm provides a multichannel product that enables you to track six types of campaigns in the same platform. mobileStorm is slightly less comprehensive than Unica because it doesn't report on Web traffic, but it does allow you to track email, SMS, voice, fax, RSS, and video. Its database management capabilities enable you to create custom Web forms and mobile forms to gather data from your website and integrate the mobileStorm system into your existing CRM through APIs. It can also help you track phone numbers of subscriptions and removals from the lists, or even create suppression lists as you target various segments.
Responsys
Responsys offers another option for tracking cross-channel marketing efforts that include mobile marketing. This multichannel product is called InteractCampaign. When it is coordinated with InteractProgram, you can create a very dynamic tractable campaign, full of multichannel and cross-channel triggered responses. This seamless integration of cross-channel marketing with triggered responses means that if a customer responds to a mobile ad in one way and an online ad in another, the customer could automatically be sent a promotional email that combines the learnings from both the online and mobile responses.
As you develop your mobile marketing campaigns, keep this list of mobile tracking and analytics tactics and platforms in mind. It is important to stay current on the new mobile tracking and analytics services that are available because they change and develop; mobile marketing is still relatively new, and tracking is important, so likely a lot of innovation will arise in this aspect of the game.
As companies begin to spend more money developing interactive applications, it has become more important to track how users are interacting with the applications and what impact the applications are having on branding and engagement. The following companies might be able to help you track the success of your mobile applications.
Flurry
Flurry is an application-only mobile tracking system that was one of the first independent application tracking platforms available. It can monitor applications from a variety of different platforms, including iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and JavaME (see Figure 3.18). It can both monitor the sequence of actions that people take within an application and use dynamic parameters to evaluate user-generated content and other interactive portions of the application.
The Flurry mobile reporting suite shows access to the mobile website by top devices and carriers.
Google Analytics
In addition to tracking mobile Web activity, the same tracking code and platform can be used to track customer behavior within an application. The system currently works with Android and iPhone applications and is reported in much the same way Web traffic is presented.
Omniture
In addition to its Web traffic reporting platform, Omniture offers a tool called Omniture App Measurement that helps companies track the success and behavior of people on their iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry applications. This solution is also part of SiteCatalyst and uses the WHERE platform to determine where users are when they are accessing your mobile applications. This kind of usage information can be critical when determining how and where to promote your applications.
WebTrends
WebTrends also offers analytics for mobile applications, although the company is not very precise about what is included. The project might need further development before it rivals other mobile analytics tracking programs; this service does not appear to be a major push for them yet.
Email is very different when it is displayed on a mobile phone instead of a traditional computer, so information about mobile email should be evaluated slightly differently. As it turns out, many people are not acting on commercial emails when they are on their mobile phones. Instead, they are using downtime to scan their emails, delete SPAM, and mentally flag items that require follow-up or seem important. When you review the response rate for mobile emails, it might be low, but the presentation of your email in a mobile device could ensure that it is even seen on a traditional computer at all.
As with any email campaign, you should be tracking the number of emails sent, received, opened, and bounced, as well as the response rate to those emails. Becaus email cannot be directed to a mobile device in one instance and a traditional computer in the other, the email might be received on a traditional computer, a mobile device, or both places. This can make measurement a bit complicated; the followin companies should be able to help with mobile email optimization and tracking.
• ExactTarget—ExactTarget is a traditional email platform that was one of the first to begin integrating mobile delivery into its email solution. Its platform enables you to integrate your system with a variety of different platforms, including SalesForce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, WebTrends, CoreMetrics, Google Analytics, and Omniture.
The ExactTarget system also lets you send different responses based on specific customer behaviors, otherwise known as triggered responses. It also enables you to create content libraries and send content in emails that is dynamically generated, based on different demographics or filters. When they are set up in the system, each different behavior, triggered response, or dynamic email can be tracked and evaluated to determine the relative success of the different segments.
• mobileStorm—As with other email platforms, mobileStorm enables you to create and segment subscription lists and monitor the success of your campaign. In addition, mobileStorm specializes in mobile marketing, so it offers a variety of other products and services that companies can use to set up mobile-friendly email campaigns, track their success, and personalize responses. These campaigns can work independently or in tandem with SMS campaigns, and the two can be combined to grow your subscribers' lists.
mobileStorm can also help you set up autoresponses on email and SMS campaigns, to manage the opt-in and opt-out process seamlessly, and help you track and manage the mobile and traditional coupons that you send. If you are marketing an event, the system also includes a handy RSVP manager.
• Pivotal Veracity—Pivotal Veracity is another traditional email provider that can help with mobile email delivery (see Figure 3.17). It focuses on deliverability and rendering, both of which are crucial to the success of mobile email. In terms of tracking, their platform provides advanced analytics and custom weighting, to gain a deeper understanding of how different responses impact your bottom line. The platform focuses on the capability to preview how your email will look on a variety of different phones. After deployment, it helps track the deliverability and click-through rate for traditional and mobile landing pages.
Pivotal Veracity delivers diagnostics, which include information about two Blackberry renderings and the iPhone.
comScore is another company that offers a traditional Web analytics platform that includes mobile reporting, although it is actually better known for its publication of reliable industry statistics about the growth of different marketing channels. In 2008, comScore acquired m:Metrics, a company that offered the mobile analytics platform MeterDirect but was also focused on providing comprehensive statistics on the growth and adoption of the mobile marketing channel.
Through m:Metrics, comScore now can provide its subscribers with a variety of mobile research and statistics, as well as some site information through its analytics platform. Since the acquisition, meter direct has been adapted, so the mobile offerings comScore provides now include the following:
• MobiLens—This tool draws together content merchandising and consumer behavior with mobile devices to show how different devices respond to your mobile marketing.
• Mobile Metrix—This platform provides continuous tracking of your mobile audiences user behavior and compiles information such as gender, age, and income with handset and operator information.
• Ad Metrix Mobile—This analytics platform was created specifically for advertisers and publishers to measure mobile display advertising campaigns.
• Plan Metrix Mobile—This platform brings together mobile Web analytics and real-life personal characteristics of users. It includes information about device type and carrier information, along with traditional media consumption, lifestyles, interests, and attitudes.
WebTrends Analytics 9 is another traditional analytics platform that has begun to offer mobile analytics information. Their platform reports on traffic from mobile browsers, search engine bots, operating systems, and browsers. WebTrends is slightly newer to the mobile analytics game, but it has made public commitments to stay updated so that it provides an easy and reliable source of mobile analytics data. JavaScript is used to track smart phones that support it, and an API is used to collect data from phones that don't support JavaScript.
Omniture is one of the longest-standing and most well-known traditional analytics platforms. In 2008, it added mobile analytics to its SiteCatalyst platform. Omniture also enables you to segment visitors based on device type, device manufacturer, and cookie support, but it adds location, video, and audio formats into its segmentation capability (see Figure 3.15). The mobile portion of SiteCatalyst offers essentially the same reporting and roll-up capabilities for mobile as it does traditional Web traffic. As mentioned earlier, SiteCatalyst can also interface with Bango Analytics to pull in more mobile specific data through the API. See Figure
SiteCataiysts enables you to segment visitors based on a variety of factors. (Data has been intentionally blurred in this image to protect the privacy of these users.)
Omnitures SiteCataiyst graph showing mobile device access to a specific page. (Data has been intentionally blurred in this image to protect the privacy of these users.)
To provide location information, Omniture works with a platform called WHERE by ULocate. The WHERE platform works with a variety of different systems to deliver location-aware news, weather, events, restaurant reviews, and social networking opportunities to people while they are on the go. It provides information about the users' location while they browse your website from their mobile phone.
Now that mobile Web access has become much more common, you can use traditional Web analytics programs such as Google Analytics and Omniture to see how much mobile traffic is making it to your mobile website. The following is a review of the most popular traditional Web analytics suites that can be used or adapted to track mobile Web visitors.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free analytics platform offered by Google. Different from Google Webmaster Tools, it enables you to track and segment Web traffic in a comprehensive, easy-to-use platform. The tracking is easy to set up because it simply involves including the same piece of tracking code in pages throughout the website. This is easily done by adding the tracking code to the header of the website, if it is consistent throughout the website.
If you subscribe to the Enterprise level of Google analytics, you have access to mobile-specific tracking, and that works on phones that don't support JavaScript. The only additional setup is the insertion of a small snippet of code that sits on the server.
In the nonpremium, free version of Google Analytics, you can easily segment out iPhone traffic from other Web analytics. If you need to track other phones, you can also use Custom Segmentation to show you the browser/operating combinations to drill down to find things such as the following:
• How much traffic you are getting on specific phones
• What keywords are driving traffic in mobile searches
• What your mobile bounce rate is
• How many page views per visit your mobile site gets
• What pages are most important to your mobile users
The best option is to set up custom segments for each phone, or each group of phones that you want to track. After segmentation is set up, you can easily move between the results for specific handsets or specific types of phones (see Figure 3.13). (The segmentation rules can get very complicated and, thus, are not included in this example in full.)
Google Analytics enables you to do custom segmentation so that you can see results for specific handsets or specific types of phones.
To set up segments that will group all mobile phones so that they can be reported on together, you must set up the Advanced Custom Segments. In this dashboard, include all mobile browsers and operating systems. To set up segments for specific phones, you simply need a list of the top handsets so that you can enter the browser/operating system/screen resolution/color-rendering combinations that each phone has and create them as a custom segment.
The one difficulty with Google Analytics Custom Segmentation is that you cannot set up segments in anticipation of the traffic coming to your website. For instance, if no devices with a 300¥300 screen resolution have ever visited your website, that option will not be available in your custom segmentation options. See Table
You can also set up a segment that works the opposite way, pulling out traditional computers and leaving everything else in. That gives you less specific data but is a quick way to get mobile information without a lot of setup or hassle with the analytics platform. An example of how you might do that is included in Figure, although not all the necessary rules are included.
You can also use Googie Analytics to pull out data on traditional browsers and operating systems while leaving mobile traffic in.
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