Tracking the mobile Web

Though Bango doesn’t have a presence in the wired Web, it too has seen a much more interest from its customers in mobile analytics in the last year. Bovingdon attributes it to the increasing amount of money advertisers and marketers have been spending in mobile. “With more money being spent there has to be greater accountability,” Bovingdon said.

Though Omniture is using tracking technology similar o Bango, it still hasn’t built up the database of users Bango has over the years, and according to Bovingdon, Omniture doesn’t have the billing relationships with the operator to allow it to identify some of the more elusive unique visitors in the mobile Web. What Omniture does have though is vast resources of its Web business to link its mobile and PC Internet data together, Langie said. SiteCatalyst customers can now manage campaigns across both media with a single platform.

That joint approach does present some problems, the biggest of which is identifying unique users accessing content from both a mobile phone and the PC browser. There is no way of linking user identification between a phone and a PC unless customers specifically identify themselves. Many of Omniture’s customers are bridging that gap by extending user registration from their online portals to their mobile portals. For instance, Warner Music Group has created blogs for its artists, on which users can log on and comment either from the mobile phone or PC. Ringtones purchased on an artist's Web site are downloaded to the phone establishing the critical link between mobile and desktop identities.

“What we can to provide is a single place to measure, analyze and optimize integrated data from mobile and online channels,” Langie said. “You can see where this is eventually going to go. We’ll be able to go platform-agnostic. Mobile and PC will all be part of the same campaign. The only thing different will be the actual content served up.”