Mobile Analytics Grows Up

By Sam Churchill

Research firm Gartner has projected mobile advertising spending will reach $2.7 billion globally this year, jumping a full $1 billion above 2007 levels.

By the end of 2011, Gartner expects that market to grow to $12.8 billion. Furthermore, that impact could be disproportionately higher in the U.S., due to its higher levels of mobile Internet usage.

Driven in part by the greater availability of 3G, but mainly attributable to the ready availability of cheap unlimited data packages, 40 million mobile subscribers are active users of the mobile Internet—roughly 15.6% of all U.S. subscribers. Compared to the U.K. at 12.9% and Italy at 11.9%, a far greater percentage of U.S. mobile users are surfing the mobile Web and exposing them to the advertising embedded within.

As more advertising and marketing dollars make their way to the mobile Web, measuring their impact becomes more important, says Telephony Magazine.

Many of the mobile analytics companies use “Web beacons” or “bugs”, a tiny image the size of a pixel embedded in the browser that uniquely identifies a device. But not every device accepts such beacons.

Omniture uses DotMobi’s DeviceAtlas index to identify the make and model of the phone. DeviceAtlas contains attribute information for more than 5,500 devices around the world, including devices like the Apple iPhone, Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, Nintendo DS Lite and Amazon Kindle. The database includes anything with a browser, including a Samsung refrigerator. Omniture then attempts to uniquely identify the owner of that phone.