Thursday, August 4, 2011

Mobile Analytics Can Prove Useful for Publishers

The Value of Mobile Analytics
We've been chatting for what seems like forever about the importance of online content, but the biggest obstacle continues to be how to generate revenue from this content. It's always been difficult to tell what financial payoff online content has for magazine publishers, short of actual online subscription sales.

Now, mobile or tablet analytics may provide the answer. Similar to web analytics, mobile/tablet stats provide behavioral metrics such as page views and user actions, but on a mobile device where a user can be much more focussed on a publisher's content or advertiser's message, such metrics may be much more meaningful for publishers and advertisers than web metrics.

How to Capitalize on Mobile Analytics
According to an article in Folio, these mobile metrics can include geolocation, which for a savvy marketer can be critical information to determine what content to post to solidify brand loyalty.

To really capitalize on these metrics, you have to effectively tag your pages, online elements and apps so you can track user actions such as opening a page, clicking on an object, entering information, leaving a page, starting or stopping a video playback, and so on.

Where to Start with Mobile Analytics
The mobile analytics arena is still young, and it will take a while yet for the data to build up. Qualified interpretation remains the key to turning these metrics into useful marketing information, but it's a good time to start developing a tagging infrastructure that is built into your workflow, and taking a look at vendors who can provide these metrics.

---Colleen Seto
AMPA Blogger-in-Residence