Omniture's latest addition: mobile analytics

Omniture is (again) expending by adding mobile analytics to the already long list of powerful features their online business optimization platform offers.

The announcement in 3 points

Once we remove the marketing schmoozing and clutter typical of any press release, here's the highlights:

• Metrics: Typical mobile metrics such as device type, location, video and audio formats and of course, visits, page views, paths, time on site, etc.
  
• Availability: There is no word as if this will be turned on for all their customers or if it's an additional module (I expect the former)
• Integration: The integration of mobile analytics to SiteCatalyst is much better than using specific tools for all our different needs

What's important in mobile analytics

The Omniture offering is interesting but certainly not ground breaking and honestly, that was kind of expected since many other services also offer mobile analytics. Coincidentally, Bango, a leader in mobile analytics, was announcing Bango Analytics v3.0 on the same day. Their press release also shows the results of a survey they conducted:

Results of a recent survey of more than 550 mobile website owners, commissioned by Bango, showed that the “most important” data point for them is unique visitor count. Respondents gave the following answers to the question: “Which of the following mobile web metrics are important to you?”

• The daily/weekly/monthly number of unique visitors to your mobile website - 80%
• Conversion rates/effectiveness of mobile marketing - 71%
• New/repeat visitors - 58%
• Information about the handsets your visitors use - 54%
• Location - 50%
• The mobile networks used by visitors to your mobile website - 41%

(Note: you can use the latest release of WASP to validate Bango tags by pointing your browser to the mobile version of the site. Other mobile analytics vendors are invited to contact me if they want their tags to be detected by WASP.)

Beyond "typical" mobile analytics

As I was saying in an earlier post, I'm on the product advisory board of a Montréal startup called Neuralitic. If your company heavily depend on mobile (such as games, weather, news or traffic content providers) or if you are a carrier, you should take a look at Neuralitic. While mobile analytics current focus is strictly on mobile web browsing, Neuralitic can provide statistics about the applications being used (SMS, email, video, games, etc.), the contacts being made (through email, SMS or voice) and all the data being communicated by hooking up directly with the carrier infrastructure. In theory, the mobile data could even be merged with carrier customer database to get demographics information.

This is amaizingly powerful and I leave it to you to imagine the possibilities not only for ad serving and marketing on the mobile web, but for optimizing mobile applications and services, for carriers optimization of their packages, or even leveraging mobile-to-web behavioural targetting.