AdMob

The news is starting to make it out about the analytics product AdMob has in beta. Like mentioned before, analytics on mobile is one of those things it’s easy to do poorly and very difficult to do well. Even the folks who have been paying attention to the environment for a long time don’t have clear cut answers about how to deal with thorny issues like carrier identification and user counting. I was hoping that the MMA would get out in front of the crowd on this one and drive some consensus, but that wasn’t to be. So of course I’m happy to see AdMob attempting to bring some sanity to the field. They’re certainly some of the most well positioned to deal with the global issues off-deck publishers have in understanding their mobile audience.

I haven’t been using the service actively for my sites (the main one I would think about using it on would be Mowser, which is ummm.. headed in a different direction these days), but I have sat down with the system and poked through it using other folks data. In my opinion one of the most important set of stats is around number of users over time and how long they stay. How many users do I have in a day? How many of them are returning users vs. new users? What are the “front door” areas of my site that drive new users, and how often do those users visit other areas? Stuff that AdMob has thought through both from the publisher and advertiser perspective and is well represented.

The area I’m most curious about is the device capability breakdown. Custom iPhone sites are relatively common because of the marketing and discussion that goes around that particular device. But I’m not sure that anyone has ever really exposed the additional device segmentation for the off-deck folks. Of the folks that are looking at device breakdown many that I talk to see Nokia N-series devices as the extreme front runners in terms of their total number of pageviews. While the browsers in those devices don’t have the same emotional impact that using Safari on the iPhone does the first time, I do think the devices are successfully driving mobile web usage. Will exposing some of the additional info about devices drive additional middle web style site development? It’s a question not just of device penetration and capability, but of developer mind-share and impact of user interface. There’s a real ecosystem around the iPhone, go to developer events and people are “dabbling in iPhone development”. No one is “dabbling in N-series development.” This is why I’m still an engineer by trade, I just don’t understand how Apple manages to do these things. Much respect.

Stepping up a level however, I would have really liked there to be some public consensus around how to count users and identify uniques – with compliant products following on. But one of the principles I’ve come to understand recently is that it’s easier to build something that works and let standardization form around existing practice than it is to try to drive unity from diverse groups through committee discussion. I’m hoping that what happens is that the practices that AdMob has put into place will drive behavior like the content adaption manifesto Luca put together helped to identify destructive behavior across the environment and correct it. There’s certainly the mass there to make an impact.

I’m going to be participating in the next Innovator’s Engine event at Carr and Ferrell: Ads2Go: What’s Working, Where and Why with Mobile 2.0?. It’s in the morning on December 5th. Very much in the morning, the discussion starts at 8am. I hear your senses are sharpest in the morning though, so we’ll see how that goes.

I had a conference call with the participants today, it should be an interesting discussion. We spoke about some interesting stuff, like how does the mobile advertising market in evolving areas like the US and Europe compare to the setup we see in more mature markets like Japan, are there any particular technical hurdles that need to be tackled before the advertising market can advance, and who’s really using mobile advertising currently as part of their media plan. Should be fantastic. Just don’t believe all the hype you read online, I don’t have all the answers. Only about 80 percent of them ;-) The other 20 percent I’m hoping will fall out during the conversation. Come down and join in, hope to see you there.

Kelly posted a fantastic summary of a discussion we had up at the loft last week about mobile advertising. Longer term I’m particularly interested in the web app vs downloaded application questions, and the question of the mobile web as a distinct area from the fixed web.

The questions of web app vs downloaded application might actually get somewhat obscured by the likes of Android and Ovi. A focus on services instead of applications tends to blur the line somewhat. Jaiku is an excellent example there. They have an S60 app, you can use it via IM or SMS, there’s a widget for Widsets, and a mobile friendly web version. Still, I think there will be some consolidation over time where some preferred way exists for covering the maximum number of handsets without having to develop a half dozen different versions.

Personally I think that’s going to be based on the mobile web instead of downloaded applications. However that means that the mobile browser really needs to mature a lot to make it as viable of a delivery platform as desktop browsers are now. And I don’t necessarily mean mobile AJAX here, I mean that development for mobile browsers needs to be a deterministic process. It can’t be this crapshoot with standards support and capabilities all over the map.

Which leads in to the issue of will the mobile web continue to exist as devices get better. There are at least two different issues in there: there’s the technical issue of coming up with markup that will render on a mobile device and an application level issue of delivering information tailored for a more limited device. There’s a lot of attention going into the technical side of the equation. Stuff like transcoders meant to strip out extraneous data, clean up tagging, and format the info in a more usable layout for a mobile device. And there are W3C efforts to define markups that can be supported across a wide range of devices.

However, even if the markup ends up being the same, assume that my phone was able to render any web page just well as my desktop browser could, does that mean the “death of the mobile web”? Would it still make sense to do two versions of the web application based on the user’s modality? Not based on if they’re accessing from their phone or their desktop, but based on if they’re using from their phone will seated on the train or using on their phone while wandering around a strange city looking for their friends.

I think the distinction will always remain, but there are definitely questions about where that “other version” comes from. Does it get produced entirely by the application provider? Or do they provide some extra tags (like the fb:mobile tag in FBML) that give hinting to other services which still provide a degree of adaptation? Right now the only realistic method is to make the two versions yourself. The problem of adapting a web user interface just isn’t well understood enough for someone to be able to factor out common parts and expose a meaningful set of hooks and capabilities. That’s still up for grabs really. There’s still a lot of blank space and potential in the market. Plenty of room for great ideas and plenty of unpopulated areas.