Measure your mobile initiatives

Nearly every day I read arti­cles on Mobile Mar­keter about busi­nesses launch­ing new mobile ini­tia­tives: from mobile ad cam­paigns to iPhone apps and from enhanced ven­dor ser­vices to strate­gic part­ner­ships. Even after cut­ting through the hype, its obvi­ous enter­prises large and small are scal­ing up their invest­ment in mobile. Yet, as I read news feeds such as these and dia­logue with cus­tomers, prospects, and part­ners one theme remains con­sis­tent: many mobile ini­tia­tives launch with lit­tle or no ana­lyt­ics and opti­miza­tion strat­egy beyond very basic met­rics like click-through rates or down­loads. A col­league, Matt Langie, high­lighted this theme in his blog six months ago in a post about mobile ana­lyt­ics.

Inter­est in Mobile Ana­lyt­ics Lags Mobile Web Usage
The divide is also appar­ent when com­par­ing the per­cent­age of analytic-related searches which include mobile key­words to the per­cent­age of page views which are gen­er­ated by mobile devices. While mobile ana­lytic search vol­ume is less than .5% of all ana­lytic related searches, many web­sites are see­ing between 1.5% and 10% of total page views orig­i­nat­ing from mobile devices. For web­sites heav­ily invest­ing in mobile ini­tia­tives, page requests from mobile devices can be even higher—35%+ of the total page views in some cases. In other words, web usage from mobile devices is accel­er­at­ing but many busi­nesses haven’t fully engaged ana­lyt­ics and opti­miza­tion efforts for the channel.

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
If your enter­prise is launch­ing (or has already launched) mobile spe­cific ini­tia­tives, you should ensure an opti­miza­tion strat­egy has been for­mu­lated and mea­sure­ment for the ini­tia­tives has been deployed. Ini­tial efforts in any “emerg­ing” space have sig­nif­i­cant oppor­tu­nity to build the busi­ness. How­ever these efforts are more sus­tain­able in the long term if the ROI of the invest­ment can be demon­strated through ana­lyt­ics and then improved through optimization.

Your fledg­ling mobile ini­tia­tives may be wildly suc­cess­ful or they may need tweak­ing. Either way, the long-term suc­cess of such efforts may depend on your abil­ity to mea­sure, ana­lyze, and opti­mize them.

Mea­sure
The first step in quan­ti­fy­ing and improv­ing ROI for a mobile ini­tia­tive is to mea­sure the effort. The pur­pose of today’s post is to dis­cuss mea­sure­ment strate­gies for some of the most com­mon chan­nels includ­ing mobile opti­mized sites, mobile appli­ca­tions, mobile cam­paigns, and mobile video. The next sev­eral sec­tions will detail how to approach the tech­ni­cal imple­men­ta­tion of these ini­tia­tives so if you’re not a devel­oper, now is a good time to reach out to your favorite engi­neer or tech lead.

Mobile Opti­mized Sites
When deploy­ing mea­sure­ment for a mobile opti­mized site, there are two main parts to the imple­men­ta­tion: (1) the tag­ging method­ol­ogy (i.e., JavaScript, man­ual page cod­ing, server-side script­ing, packet sniff­ing, log file records) and (2) the data trans­port mech­a­nism (i.e., image bea­con, XML, direct HTTP request, FTP—for log-file analysis).

The most com­mon mea­sure­ment approach for tag­ging and trans­port on mobile opti­mized sites is to lever­age server-side script­ing to gen­er­ate a for­mat­ted request either through cre­ation of an image sent back to the page which the device then requests from the data col­lec­tion server or by gen­er­at­ing an HTTP or XML request which is sent directly to the data col­lec­tion server when the device requests the page.

In the Site­Cat­a­lyst v14.6 release, Omni­ture sig­nif­i­cantly enhanced sup­port for this method of data col­lec­tion by adding a class which han­dles tag­ging, for­mat­ting, and trans­port­ing requests. Imple­men­ta­tion details for the new mea­sure­ment library can be found in the Help area of Site­Cat­a­lyst. Just login and go to Help > Sup­port­ing Docs > Man­u­als > Mea­sure­ment Library (PHP).

Essen­tially, the new class allows mobile imple­men­ta­tions to closely resem­ble stan­dard web­site imple­men­ta­tions which ref­er­ence a few lines of page code, uti­lize an exter­nal library, and ensure best prac­tices are fol­lowed. The main dif­fer­ence being the stan­dard web­site imple­men­ta­tion lever­ages JavaScript whereas the new mea­sure­ment library lever­ages a server-side language.

If the new class doesn’t meet your need, you can still deploy mea­sure­ment by using a server-side script to gen­er­ate an image bea­con, a direct HTTP request, or an XML request. Once basic mea­sure­ment has been deployed, I sug­gest review­ing the Mobile Imple­men­ta­tion Man­ual to ensure you are lever­ag­ing Omniture’s best prac­tices for imple­ment­ing mobile sites. The guide can be found in the Omni­ture Knowl­edge Base under imple­men­ta­tion man­u­als and is titled “Mobile Device Reporting.”

Mobile Appli­ca­tions
The 1.5+ bil­lion iPhone apps down­loaded have cer­tainly caused a big stir. If you are involved in mobile ini­tia­tives within the orga­ni­za­tion you’ve prob­a­bly con­sid­ered or been involved in the release of a mobile appli­ca­tion on one or more pop­u­lar mobile plat­forms (iPhone, Black­berry, Android, Palm Pre, Sym­bian, etc.).

Although some cus­tomers have been mea­sur­ing mobile appli­ca­tion usage with Omni­ture for years either using the XML API or Data Sources, Omni­ture sig­nif­i­cantly enhanced sup­port for mea­sur­ing inter­ac­tions with mobile apps in two releases this year (Jan­u­ary & July). The new method­ol­ogy allows cus­tomers to lever­age Omni­ture libraries native to the plat­form the appli­ca­tion is writ­ten in.

For exam­ple, to deploy mea­sure­ment for an iPhone app you sim­ply embed the Omni­ture iPhone com­po­nents into the exist­ing iPhone app, cus­tomize vari­ables, and call the Omni­ture rou­tine (track or track­link) to send the ana­lyt­ics. The imple­men­ta­tion is very sim­i­lar for the other sup­ported mobile app plat­forms. One advan­tage to this style of deploy­ment is mea­sure­ment can be deployed very quickly—less than an hour for a basic imple­men­ta­tion in some cases.

If you’d like to review the spe­cific imple­men­ta­tion steps for the platform(s) you will be launch­ing your app on, you can find step-by-step imple­men­ta­tion guides in the Knowl­edge Base. Just login to Site­Cat­a­lyst and go to Help > Sup­port­ing Docs > Man­u­als > App Mea­sure­ment for Android/Blackberry/iPhone/Symbian (imple­men­ta­tion steps for Palm can be found in the last post on Palm Pre app mea­sure­ment).

If the native libraries aren’t the right fit, you can still deploy a mea­sure­ment solu­tion using XML, Data Sources, or the new server-side mea­sure­ment library. Details on how to imple­ment these meth­ods can be found in the knowl­edge base.

Mobile Cam­paigns (Ban­ner, SEO, SEM, Bar­code, Mes­sag­ing, Wid­gets, Book­marks, E-mail, etc.)
Deploy­ing mea­sure­ment for mobile cam­paigns almost can’t be over­sim­pli­fied. Mea­sur­ing mobile cam­paigns which drive users back to a web­site can be split into two parts: (1) pro­vid­ing a unique url which dis­tin­guishes the cam­paign from other entry meth­ods, and (2) cre­at­ing a mech­a­nism for send­ing this cam­paign iden­ti­fier to Omniture.

To accom­plish #1, it’s usu­ally best to set­tle on a unique URL query para­me­ter which iden­ti­fies cam­paigns and pair that with an iden­ti­fy­ing value unique to the cam­paign. For exam­ple, a link encoded in a bar­code might look some­thing like the following:

Once the QR bar­code has been scanned with a reader, it’s decoded to a URL that looks like this: http://​omni​ture​.com/​?​s​_​s​c​i​d​=qr.

The URL can then be accessed on the device to take the user to Omni​ture​.com.

Once the user accesses the link, you’ll want to ensure mea­sure­ment has been deployed which picks up these cam­paign codes and places them in the cor­re­spond­ing Omni­ture vari­able (usu­ally the cam­paign vari­able which appears as v0 in the query string). If you access the Omni­ture link above, you will notice the value ‘qr’ shows up in the cam­paign vari­able (v0).

To mod­ify your track­ing bea­con and accom­plish #2 with server-side code you could deploy some­thing like the PHP code below (sim­i­lar capa­bil­i­ties are avail­able in other server-side lan­guages). Often the busi­ness will have already stan­dard­ized on a sin­gle cam­paign iden­ti­fier and it’s a best prac­tice to use the same iden­ti­fier for mobile cam­paigns. The exam­ple below assumes ‘cmp’ is the query string para­me­ter being used to uniquely iden­tify the campaign.

Sam­ple PHP

$campaign=$_GET['cmp'];
…
echo "<img src=\"http://cname.domain.com/b/ss/rsid/5/123456?v0=".$campaign."\" width=\"5\" height=\"5\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" />";
?>

Sam­ple PHP Using New Mea­sure­ment Library

…
$s->$campaign=$_GET['cmp'];
…
echo $s->track();
?>

Adding mea­sure­ment for SEO efforts is slightly dif­fer­ent since you will need to pass along the page’s refer­rer. If your deploy­ment will be using the server-based mea­sure­ment class, col­lec­tion of the refer­rer will be done auto­mat­i­cally. If not, here’s how to pass along the refer­rer as part of your mea­sure­ment beacon.

Sam­ple PHP

$page_referrer=$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
…
echo "<img src=\"http://cname.domain.com/b/ss/rsid/5/123456?r=".$page_referrer."\" width=\"5\" height=\"5\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" />";
?>

Mobile Video
A recent mar­ket study by Transpera and Insigh­t­Ex­press showed users of mobile video exhibit behav­iors that make them a key demo­graphic for adver­tis­ers. The study uncov­ered other inter­est­ing tid­bits which show the value of this uniquely engaged demo­graphic. Regard­less of the indus­try, if your busi­ness is pro­vid­ing mobile video, there is a sig­nif­i­cant oppor­tu­nity to max­i­mize the impact of video on KPIs (i.e. seg­ment mobile video users, opti­mize video usage, improve ad sales posi­tion­ing, etc.).

Regard­less of the desired opti­miza­tion, the first step is to ensure usage of mobile videos is being mea­sured. While sev­eral viable approaches exist for cap­tur­ing mobile video usage depend­ing on device capa­bil­i­ties, deliv­ery for­mat, and video access method, we’ll just touch on the most com­mon use case—accessing video through a link on a mobile-optimized site. Most of the tech­ni­cal steps to deploy video mea­sure­ment in this sce­nario have already been cov­ered in the prior post on Mea­sur­ing mobile user actions in Site­Cat­a­lyst.

While you could just use the method cov­ered in the post to incre­ment desired cus­tom vari­ables and the cus­tom link report, why not use some of the out-of-the-box video report­ing capa­bil­i­ties? To lever­age the stan­dard Omni­ture video reports, you need addi­tional video para­me­ters not cov­ered in the prior post.

To cus­tomize the link redi­rec­tion method, you’ll set the page event type (pe) to indi­cate the type of user inter­ac­tion being mea­sured is media (pe=media) and you’ll set the media para­me­ters with their cor­re­spond­ing attrib­utes of the video being viewed. (medi­aName, medi­aLength, medi­aPlayer, medi­aSes­sion). In this case, we don’t know what the user’s ses­sion will ulti­mately look like so we set medi­aSes­sion to 0–0.

Here’s a work­ing example:

Orig­i­nal site link: <a href=“http://www.omniture.com/en/product_tours/sitecatalyst13”>SiteCatalyst Prod­uct Tour</a>

Rewrit­ten link: <a href=“http://metrics.yoursite.com/b/ss/reportsuiteid/5.4/REDIR/?url=http://www.omniture.com/en/product_tours/sitecatalyst13&pe=media&mediaName=D=url&mediaLength=120&mediaPlayer=mobile&mediaSession=0–0″>SiteCatalyst Prod­uct Tour</a>

The usage of the dynamic vari­able flag (D=) in the exam­ple above will result in the video url being used as the name in the video reports. To cus­tomize the reports to show a more friendly value, sim­ply replace the value in medi­aName with the desired name.

Note: Some of the Omni­ture video func­tion­al­ity will not be avail­able when using this method. For exam­ple, since the actual sec­onds of the video con­sumed are not avail­able at the time the link is clicked, the fol­low­ing reports (video seg­ments viewed, time spent on video) and the fol­low­ing met­rics (video views X-100, Aver­age View Time) are not available.

Get Code & Docs
We’ve cov­ered basic ana­lyt­ics imple­men­ta­tion steps for mobile opti­mized sites, mobile apps, mobile cam­paigns, and mobile video. How­ever, as you begin imple­ment­ing the var­i­ous solu­tions cov­ered, I rec­om­mend access­ing tech­ni­cal doc­u­ments and code for each mea­sure­ment method­ol­ogy you plan on deploy­ing. The tech­ni­cal docs men­tioned in this arti­cle can be found by log­ging in to Site­Cat­a­lyst and brows­ing to Help > Sup­port­ing Docs > Man­u­als; and code libraries for mobile opti­mized sites and mobile apps can be found by log­ging in to Site­Cat­a­lyst and brows­ing to Admin > Admin Con­sole > Code Manager.