• Daily, weekly and monthly summary reports by email, tailored to your needs
• Low balance alerts by email when your funds are running low in one of your ad networks
• Currency conversion: track campaigns in any currency of your choosing
• Even more ad networks supported

There has been huge interest at the Mobile World Congress, and we’re now offering a free 30 day trial.  This may not last long, so grab the opportunity while you can.

But Apple doesn’t want it to shift gear … not in iPhone apps at least.  They’ve positively forbidden it and will reject apps that use location to deliver more relevant ads to the user.

Having recently bought its own ad network, Quattro Wireless, you might have thought that Apple could now deliver rich, interactive, targeted ads to iPhone owners and charge advertisers royally for the privilege.

It could also help app developers better monetize their apps, thus fuelling the creation of ever more free ad-supported apps on the app store.  But therein lies the problem.  Apple does not really need more free apps.  There are over 150 000 apps in the app store, the majority of which are free.  Services like Appsfire are springing up to solve the problem of how to discover apps in the haystack.  Apple would probably much rather have more paid or micropayment-enabled apps in the store, rather than take a small commission on the relatively small proportion of ads that could be delivered through their own ad network via free apps.  It is actually in their interest that advertising in iPhone apps does not pay.

And by outlawing it, they’re also causing trouble for their competitors like Google’s Admob which is leading the way in iPhone in-app advertising and would stand to gain a lot from enabling location based advertising.

This will lead to an even stronger differentiation between Apple and Google mobile offerings:  The former offers a closed, premium, service for iPhone/iPad users paying for apps providing relevant, ad free location enabled services.  The latter offers an open, wider choice of generally free, but warts-and-all apps for Android users serving up lots of potentially annoying location based ads.  Well there you go.  Are you a Mac or a PC?

Mobile advertisers face a big problem: Fragmentation.  Not of technology, but of information.

Say you’re one of the majority of mobile advertisers wishing to drive traffic to their mobile internet site or mobile app by advertising on other mobile sites and apps.  How do you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns?  The agencies and ad networks alone can’t tell you. A high exposure rate is meaningless unless you get clicks, and yet a high click through rate is not always a good thing.  Your site analytics alone can’t tell you because you don’t know if those high conversion rates came at a prohibitive price.

So at a minimum you need to track spend on the ads and conversions on your site / app for each and every campaign you run.  And this is where fragmentation laughs in your face and turns your marketing team into copy-pasting slaves.  The problem is threefold:

-        duplication of reporting from ad networks and agencies

-        duplication of conversion tracking on your site/app

-        stitching it together

Firstly, you’ve got to aggregate ad performance data in a meaningful way from multiple ad networks and agencies.  Some of the more forward-thinking ones are realising this and planning an API to give their clients direct access to their data (I wrote about this recently: Ad networks: emancipate your clients data!).  But precious few of them are doing this and it will probably be years before they all do, by which time many will have been acquired or sidelined.  Meantime, you have to navigate your way through many different, sometimes complex, sometimes downright awful reporting interfaces to manually extract your data.

Secondly, for those ad networks that offer ‘conversion tracking’ features, you need to integrate their tracking code into your site or app in order to see full CPA performance data for each ad running on their network.  This sounds like a great idea, until you realise how many separate tracking codes you’re going to need to integrate to cover all the ad networks.  Once you’ve got more than a couple of these ‘trackers’ running, response times are going to suffer.  Don’t worry though, hardly any offer this yet anyway.  You could use an analytics provider to track conversions instead, but you’ll need separate tracker codes for your mobile sites (Admob, Bango and Omniture are the most well-known with Google only recently releasing a mobile analytics service) and for your apps (the recent merger of Flurry and Pinch Media is looking a good bet here but still does not cover all the device base).

These two issues compound the problem of how to stitch it all together.  Obviously there’s the sheer effort of just having to collect and capture common-denomination, comparable data from all these sources into one place and then match it all up.  Then there are time zone and currency differences.  Nearly all ad networks and some analytics providers think you live just up the road from them.  How are you supposed to compare ad spend in the US delivered by an ad network headquartered in India with conversion data from your analytics provider in the UK?

For me, there is one clear and relatively simple solution to this problem:  Ad networks and analytics providers give your clients their data in a time zone independent format and liberate it with an API. That way, they can easily combine and compare ad performance end to end for each and every one of their campaigns.  The advertisers and ad agencies will be the final deciders on this, and they will choose those companies in the ecosystem that are able to give them the data they need whenever and however they want it.

Contrary to what some of the ad networks state in their terms and conditions, the performance data really belongs to the advertiser, with the ad networks responsible for safeguarding and respecting the privacy of that data. Does AdMob (GoogMob?) own, and have the right to publish and share, the adspend and clickthrough data of Nike? Of course not. It just has the right to use it in aggregate to track and develop insights into industry trends and improve their service.

Advertisers want their data, and they don’t want to go through all those different reporting interfaces (some are ok, some are downright appalling) to get it. So it is great news to see AdMob, the innovation leader in this space, confirming in a public tweet that they are definitely working on such an API.

Almost every advertiser uses multiple ad networks to deliver their ad campaigns. And the ones that they will choose will recognise that the data belongs first and foremost to the advertiser and give them access to it however and whenever they want.

There are big brands advertising on mobile, but in a different way and in small doses; they are often working with agencies and ad networks that can tell them which sites their ads will be displayed on and the user demographics of those sites because it’s important to control their brand image. They are also advertising on the iPhone where they can find more well-off consumers, despite in some cases losing control over which apps their ads will appear in.

For mobile advertising to really take off, the big brands and non-mobile companies need to spend more money on it, which will be driven by:

• More control over the quality of their ad campaigns, driven largely by greater smartphone adoption and data speeds
• Greater confidence in where and how their ads are displayed so they can control their brand image
• More accurate measurement of ads, which depends on agencies and ad networks providing improved ad performance data in a way that can be aggregated and compared, and also on better analytics of what happens on the advertiser’s properties in order to give an accurate end to end picture of short and long term ad performance and ROI
• Greater cross-channel integration of the conception, delivery and measurement of ad campaigns across multiple media in addition to mobile.

I think that the technical challenge of ad delivery to a fragmented mobile device base is largely on the way to being solved. The measurement of unique users and understanding who they in greater depth are has not … but this is an envisioned advantage of mobile over traditional media, and I do not see it as a brake for growth right now. And since most of the privacy issues are again associated with the new envisioned capabilities of mobile, they are in my opinion simply (though not straightforwardly) something that needs to be managed as the industry continues to innovate.

Image attributed to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/celinet/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Firstly, most people ought to know by now that the most effective mobile advertising involves well targeted, integrated and relevant ads that are delivered in moderation and seen by people who are expecting them.  People expect them when browsing mobile sites or using free apps, and they expect them when they opt in to receive ads by SMS, MMS or voicemail.  Ads that do not meet these conditions just end up wasting everyone’s time and patience.

Secondly, the report treats mobile marketing as synonymous with direct marketing techniques adapted for mobile (sending SMS or MMS or voicemails).  Such techniques are only a part of mobile advertising, which in addition covers ad delivery methods such as mobile web search and display, in-app and via bluetooth.  And mobile advertising is only a small part of mobile marketing, which does not always involve the delivery of ads.  For example, a store sending an SMS to a loyal (opted in) customer when a new product line comes in is a form of mobile marketing but I would not consider the message to be an ad.

So actually, whilst the report is saying that ‘the percentage of people who don’t like mobile marketing has increased’, what it’s really saying is that direct marketing techniques on mobile are probably at least as annoying as receiving junk mail in the post.

Admob, on the other hand, just went for simple and mobile-ready and grew it from there. It also took a leaf from Google’s book and offered a free mobile analytics tool to help advertisers and publishers make more sense of their forays into mobile, something which Google only just got round to last month. With their recent push into iphone and android in-app advertising, real revenues more than doubling every year, their Google-like ‘open’ positioning, and their knowledge and ability to generate constant buzz and keep the top spot in mobile marketing globally, Admob was in the right place for Google.

Was $750m the right price? Admob currently serves around 10bn ad impressions a month, at click through rates of say 1-3%, average CPC $0.05-0.10. They get a 40% cut of adspend. Take away 140 employees salaries and tech costs, and you end up with between $17m and $127m yearly EBITDA. At a valuation of a multiple of 6-8 times profits, this puts Admob somewhere in the range of $100m to $1Bn. I suspect their revenues were at the lower end of the scale, but frankly Google’s need under the circumstances was great. Given the growth potential of mobile advertising, the $750m price tag for Admob looks like an excellent deal.

Google Wireless Transcoder(GWT) is known to cache publisher pages and serves it to browsers with some common features like carrier, handset capabilities for some time. At this moment we don’t know how long this cache is hot and what is the criteria for caching data. But as a side effect of caching publisher pages, GWT also caches the InMobi ads stitched into it. This results in

• Opportunity loss for publishers: publisher servers and hence InMobi don’t know about page impression and old ads keep rolling
• Incorrect Targeting

InMobi’s research suggests that adding the following meta tags in a <HEAD> tag of site pages is effective in avoiding caching.

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”>
<META CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”>

We therefore recommend that publishers adopt this recommendation to enhance monetization of their properties.

Great advice.  Keep it coming!