Mobile Audience Development
Tracking and managing mobile customers is similar to an online audience, with a few critical differences.
As publishers move from their early flirtations with mobile content publishing to full-blown business models, monitoring and analyzing traffic and audience metrics is becoming a key component in determining content and product development. Mobile audience analysis is similar to that of Web sites, but there are some limitations—and workarounds.
“In a nutshell, we use all the same metrics we use online,” says Yaron Oren, director, mobile strategy and operations at Hachette Filipacchi Media, U.S., which attracts more than 2 million visitors per month across its mobile properties. “These include page views, unique users, session length and so on. It’s really the same user experience if you’re talking about a mobile Web site.”
If you’re not talking about a mobile Web site, you’re likely talking about downloadable applications for iPhones and other smart phones. “Those metrics are different,” notes Oren, “you’re downloading something and you’re not necessarily connected so that might be a little trickier.”
Mobile Web sites, however, do have limits that prevent them from matching the level of user detail that standard Web site monitoring can offer. “Part of the challenge is getting as much granularity of the data,” says Oren. “Unique users has always been difficult to track on mobile because not every phone supports cookies.”
To compensate, Oren tracks unique visits and page views. Plus, there’s third-party, survey-based data from Nielsen Mobile and comScore that Oren can supplement with. “They report on unique users and it’s all survey-based, so it’s looking at that in combination with what we’re able to measure internally. Unfortunately, in some cases, it’s taking a best guess.”
Not all is lost, however, if you’re unable to know how a single user is returning to the site. Trends on content sections and types are measurable and can provide a great deal of insight to help drive product development.
For example, Oren says that the first versions of Hachette’s mobile sites emphasized a navigation menu on the home page rather than links directly to content. “From our data, we saw that our page views per visit were pretty low, but when we drilled down into where all the page views were happening we found that users were getting very deep into the sites and looking at 50 images in a photo gallery, for example.”
Data revealed that many users were turned off by the navigation menu and opted not to explore. “They just looked at one page and were gone,” says Oren.
For the next round of development Oren’s team added more content to the home pages, which led to higher retention rates.
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