Mobile Ads Get a Boost with Google Analytics - Eswar Priyadarshan, CTO

Eswar Priyadarshan, CTO

We have seen a flurry of announcements in recent weeks that point to an inflection moment for the mobile internet. Smartphone announcements galore, Adobe Flash goes mainstream and now perhaps the one most significant for awakening many advertisers to the potential of the mobile channel – Google announcing the expansion of Google Analytics to mobile.

It’s common knowledge that a lot of Internet advertising today is driven by the long-tail of direct response and local advertisers who utilize search and other performance advertising mechanisms to drive traffic and conversions. Many online long-tail advertisers who buy on systems such as Google AdWords utilize Google Analytics to understand what happens after the ad click. How many people abandoned after hitting their entry page? Which traffic sources (search, display ads, affiliate sites) produced the best conversions? What is the average time spent on the site?

Google’s extension of their free analytics tool to mobile means that many of the advertisers who rely on it for insights will now treat the mobile channel as a mainstream advertising medium.  I don’t expect an overnight shift in ad spend, since advertisers need to strategically plan for and develop their mobile presence, such as building mobile landing pages, but I do expect the curve of advertisers joining the mobile bandwagon to now resemble the general consumer curve of the adoption of Smartphones, the mobile internet, apps and the like.

This announcement is good for direct marketers and local advertisers with niche content or a commerce offering. What about major consumer brand advertisers? Will they adopt the Google mobile analytics tool? What about the larger direct response powerhouse advertisers such as travel sites, online education and entertainment subscription sites?

Quattro Wireless has long served as the ad serving and post-click analytics partner of major brands such as P&G, Ford, Coke and Sony. We have also driven considerable traffic to major direct response advertisers such as Papa John’s Pizza and Netflix. We therefore have a good, realistic assessment of these advertisers’ key needs now and going forward.

Google Analytics is a powerful Cost-Per-Acquisition analysis tool – very necessary for advertisers big and small who diversify their “click spend” across many traffic acquisition channels. Google Analytics is not an audience and engagement tool. Put another way, Google Analytics will not tell you very much about who your audience is and why they are behaving a certain way, but it will tell you what they do on your current site – this is good for an advertiser who is spending on reach, not so concerned about the who and why, but certainly concerned that the right “what” is happening for site visitors.

Major brands are all about who and why. P&G Household Products marketers care about Moms. Major supermarket advertisers care about Moms only in the geographic areas where they have stores. Major movie studios target Teens on Thursday nights with ads for movies that open Friday. These simple examples are just the tip of the iceberg on the degree of audience segmentation and analysis that major brands require from their advertising and analytics partners. Mobile analytics for major brand advertisers means (a) the ability to as accurately as possible identify unique mobile visitors, (b) provide a rich set of site traffic and engagement metrics about these visitors, (c) provide tons of mobile specific drill-down in terms of mobile devices, carriers, classes of devices (touch screen, QWERTY keyboard, video enabled etc.) and (d) provide additional insight on engagement by various audience segments.

Quattro Wireless’ analytics tools provide solutions to all four classes of problems above. Google does not try to tackle the “mobile uniques” problem in their Analytics tool – they basically say unique visitor tracking works if the phone supports cookies. Many older phones and many wireless carrier gateways even with newer phones disable or throw off any cookie-dependant solution. The iPhone ships with the strongest privacy respecting cookie solution as the default (aka “Never”). Given mobile cookie issues, I would not be surprised if for many marketers Google’s mobile unique visitor reporting does not provide the full picture but is only a sample of their actual visitors – which for brands obsessed with audience quality, audience size and engagement will not provide them with the actionable data they need

Going beyond counting the audience properly, brands want a mobile analytics tool to provide them deeper mobile insight than just overall device and carrier statistics for their traffic. For example, a major advertiser running a campaign on our Network asked why they were seeing low engagement with their site of late (i.e. people were just visiting their home page and leaving). Quattro Wireless’ analytics enabled them to quickly isolate the lower engagement numbers to a particular brand of Smartphone devices, which was another puzzle, as Smartphones are typically great devices for user engagement. Further analysis showed that it was it was a specific model of the Smartphone brand, which was an even deeper puzzle, since it was a newer model with rich capabilities. Final analysis across all of the advertisers’ sites indicated that this particular model consistently performed worse than all others. The advertiser shifted the traffic away from the device and the engagement numbers returned to their normal higher levels.

A second example is the conversion tracking “pixel” and accompanying conversion reporting that we provide many of our direct response advertising partners. We had an advertiser drop in the pixel on their landing page and their conversion success page and within weeks report that they were able to act upon the conversion reports provided to dramatically reduce their Cost-Per-Acquisition. Their fixes involved shifting traffic amongst carriers, removing certain non-performing devices, and changing the mix of content they were targeting.

The examples above shows the power of real mobile analytics – both the visibility Quattro Wireless provides to advertisers regarding many relevant mobile factors that influence consumer behavior and the ability to quickly take action upon the result of the analysis. This depth of understanding provided by specialists like Quattro Wireless is a necessary component of ad buys for advertisers serious about playing in the mobile arena.

Looking ahead, Quattro Wireless fully intends to invest heavily in the mobile analytics space to further increase the depth of insight that we can provide for our advertising partners:

• We will be packaging and offering an agency and advertiser analytics tool for advertisers who want an accurate understanding of their mobile uniques plus engagement metrics around their mobile visitors.
• Our analytics package will be tightly integrated with the audience segmentation capabilities of our Q Elevation technology. Q Elevation is the foundation of our data and optimization offerings – more on this in a future newsletter article.
• We will be offering integration into Google Analytics for advertisers who use our creative services to build ad sites. This extends our overall approach of focusing on what we do best and partnering where there are other experts or incumbents that can add value for clients. We already integrate with DART for Advertisers, Microsoft Atlas and others for 3^rd party ad serving, PointRoll for rich media and Omniture for analytics – so adding Google to this suite as an additional analytics partner fits right into our overall approach.
• For Android application download tracking, we are integrating with Google Analytics Referral Tracking to provide developers and brands with real-time conversion metrics on their app download campaigns.

The arrival of a behemoth such as Google into a space does and should cause a lot of consternation and questioning amongst existing players and others with vested interests. This writer is happy that new dollars will be moving into mobile ads because Google has opened a door to an important set of advertisers. Quattro Wireless is well-positioned today and in the future to offer analytics services to brand and direct response advertisers who demand considerably deeper and stronger mobile audience insight and metrics. Additionally, we will offer easy integration with Google Analytics for those advertisers who choose to use it for their mobile analytics.