You CAN Take It With You-Musings on Mobile

The only con­stant is change, to para­phrase everyone’s favorite Greek philoso­pher Her­a­cli­tus. I would con­tend this cer­tainly holds true for us in the tech­nol­ogy business-especially online mar­ket­ing & web ana­lyt­ics. If you step back and think about how the web has evolved in the past 10 years, it’s even more amaz­ing to con­sider what we might expect to see in the next 10 years. And one of the most com­pelling areas of change will be in Mobile-with con­sumers and busi­nesses access­ing and inter­act­ing with web sites (and each other!) via a mobile device. This cer­tainly rep­re­sents great chal­lenges and incred­i­ble oppor­tu­ni­ties for those of us in the pro­fes­sion of mea­sur­ing all this mobile inter­ac­tion and mak­ing deci­sions from it.

Over the past decade there has much talk and debate about “the three screens”- being TV, PC, and mobile. From the per­spec­tive of atten­tion (and ad dol­lars), TV has received the most atten­tion and focus. By most mea­sures, it would be easy to con­clude that TV is the “first screen” in most con­sumers’ lives. Yet my own anec­do­tal obser­va­tions in the past few years have led me to con­clude that the mobile device is rapidly becom­ing the pri­mary screen– cer­tainly for the busy, on-the-go tech pro­fes­sional if not already with many con­sumers. Think about the count­less times as you’re trav­el­ing through an air­port that you see the “Black­berry prayer”-someone hunched over, hands together, focused on furi­ously thumb­ing a mes­sage back to some­one, or at least check­ing the scores on ESPN​.com of their favorite sports team. Inter­est­ingly enough, a recent Nielsen Three Screen Report shows that con­sumers are spend­ing more and more time on their mobile phones. In fact, this report revealed that adults aged 25–34 with mobile video sub­scrip­tions watched more hours of video on their mobile phone than on inter­net video! How many of you out there are mea­sur­ing and ana­lyz­ing the mobile traf­fic to your site, let alone how video is being con­sumed on mobile devices?

Drum Roll…

With that said, I am excited to share some of the recent inno­va­tion we’ve been cook­ing up in the Omni­ture labs. For those avid Site­Cat­a­lyst and iPhone users, we have just released the Site­Cat­a­lyst for iPhone now avail­able on the iTunes app store. This enables online mar­keters who are on-the-go to take Site­Cat­a­lyst with them any­where they’re traveling-at the air­port, at home, in the car (pulled aside to the shoul­der of course), or wher­ever their iPhone receives a signal.

This new appli­ca­tion builds upon the mobile ana­lyt­ics capa­bil­i­ties we announced in July as part of the lat­est Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst release, which also enables mar­keters to access their Site­Cat­a­lyst book­marks and dash­boards through their mobile device HTML browser. The mobile ana­lyt­ics capa­bil­i­ties in Site­Cat­a­lyst helps online mar­keters to bet­ter under­stand their mobile audi­ence, such as the spe­cific devices hit­ting their site, the type of video & audio sup­port with these devices, as well as cookie and javascript sup­port. These reports are crit­i­cal to under­stand­ing the makeup of the mobile audi­ence as the lack of indus­try stan­dards has tra­di­tion­ally made it more dif­fi­cult to accu­rately ana­lyze mobile traf­fic. These inno­va­tions in Site­Cat­a­lyst now pro­vide web and mobile mar­keters the abil­ity to effec­tively mea­sure key met­rics such as rev­enue per mobile device (How much is the Black­berry con­tribut­ing to direct ecom­merce sales?), shop­ping cart adds (Are iPhone users con­vert­ing at higher rates than T-Mobile Side­kick users?), as well as develop con­tent strate­gies such as video for­mats to include on the site (Which video codecs are most sup­ported across all mobile devices hit­ting our site?) and audio con­tent (Which ring­tones for­mats should we offer for download?).

Much like what Apple has done with PC’s, lap­tops, and MP3 play­ers, the iPhone has cer­tainly changed the land­scape and dynam­ics in the mobile phone indus­try. This means your cus­tomers will soon be engag­ing your site in ways you may not have pre­dicted. Don’t let these changes give your com­peti­tors a new advan­tage over you–learn what Site­Cat­a­lyst can do to help you bet­ter serve your (mobile) cus­tomers. As our good friend Her­a­cli­tus stated “The road uphill and the road down­hill are one and the same.” Just make sure that hard uphill jour­ney is the one your com­pe­ti­tion takes, while your under­stand­ing of your mobile cus­tomers enables you to coast down­hill to online success.