So many of us now days are surfing the web via our mobile phones. Naturally, you’d probably like to know how much traffic is coming to your site from mobile phones. If you are using Google Analytics, the first thing you need to do is set up a mobile profile so that way it is much easier to pull mobile traffic data. If you haven’t set up a mobile traffic profile already, just follow these five easy steps.

Okay, so after you have your mobile profile setup, the first thing is to log into Google Analytics, under your Mobile Traffic Report website profile click view report, and then click on visitors as shown below.

After you click on Visitors, click on Browser Capabilities as shown below. From here you can select a wide range of categories like Browsers, Operating Systems, Screen Colors, etc. If you want to know how much traffic from Safari or Opera Mini is coming to your site, click on Browsers as shown below.

If you are really interested in discovering the amount of traffic coming to your website from iPhones, Androids, iPods, Nokias, LGs, Windows, and more, than click on Operating Systems. You will get a colorful looking pie chart like the one below and percentage of traffic that each kind of mobile phone brings in.

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Now you can get an estimated percentage of traffic that mobile phones generate to your website. How much traffic does mobile account for your total visitors? Please feel free to comments or post your experience on our Mobile Marketers Social Network. In Eastern Europe where I am currently working, the percentage of people who own SmartPhones is small. In addition, there are relatively few, if any, mobile advertising campaigns. Thus, the percentage of mobile traffic to most advertisers here is less than one percent, but I imagine in the States and in Western Europe, that percentage is much higher.

JK Harris & Co. recently ran a click to call mobile campaign and their results were amazing. Giselle Tsirulnik wrote a wonderful story about it. Mobile accounted for 10 percent of all campaign clicks while only making up 1 percent of the total spend. Read more about this campaign here.

Feel free to share your experience with us on LinkedIn. If you’d like to make new friends with other people in the mobile industry, connect with us on Facebook.

Thanks!

Eric Melchor

Founder – FoneGigs

@FoneGigs

As more and more people make the transition to Blackberrys, iPhones and Androids, there will be an increase in visitors to your site from consumers who are getting there via their mobile. So how do you track mobile users to your website? Well if you are using Google Analytics, here is how you can set up a filter to track the number of mobile visitors.

So in order to create a mobile profile, the first step is to go to your Google Analytics page and click on Add Website Profile on your overview page (see below circled in green).

The second step is to name the profile something like Mobile Traffic and set it to Add a Profile for an existing domain.

Go back to the overview page and click on the edit link for the mobile profile on the right hand side – this is the third step.

The fourth step, on the profile settings page, look around the middle for the Filters Applied to Profile section and click Add Filter.  You can see the settings in the screen capture below.

For the fifth step, we are going to create a custom filter as shown in the screenshot below.  The expression you see in the image (pasted as text below) filters out resolution by the height and width of the screen resolutions. text:

(^[1-2]?[0-9]?[0-9]|^3[0-1][0-9]|^320)x([1-3]?[0-9]?[0-9]$|4[0-7][0-9]$|480$)

Now all you have to do is wait a day or two before you start seeing numbers which depends on the amount of traffic your site gets. You will see these numbers in your Analytics Overview under website profiles.

Recruit the best Mobile Advertising Professionals at FoneGigs.com

So what do you do if you don’t want to use Google Analytics? You can select a paid analytics solution like Bango or Amethon that has software set up to specifically track mobile users. I haven’t used them, so I cannot say whether or not their results are better.

Please feel free to add any comments or share your experience. If you’d like to connect with others and make new friends in the mobile marketing industry, join us on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. You can also find the latest mobile marketing and mobile application developer jobs on FoneGigs.com.

Thanks!

Eric Melchor, Founder, @FoneGigs

mOcean today announced the launch of a beta program related to its new mobile advertising platform aimed squarely at mobile apps.  Dubbed “MAST for apps,” the new platform claims to be the industry’s first “comprehensive ad managment” solution tailored specifically for iPhone and other smartphone app developers.

Put simply, MAST for Apps enables developers to monetize their apps by selling and managing their own mobile ad space.  To do so, the MAST for Apps platform incorporates a full suite of features, including enhanced targeting, real-time reporting and analytics, conversion tracking, yield optimization, and rich media support.  After the beta period, the company will be adding several features to the platform, including a searchable directory of apps across multiple platforms, and a cross-marketing program allowing developers to drive inbound traffic and downloads for their apps.

read full article here.

Adobe subsidiary Omniture has announced new featuers for its SiteCatalyst service, allowing people to measure usage of videos embedded in mobile websites and iPhone apps.

Metrics covered include the impact of a mobile channel on overall video distribution and monetisation strategies, differences in video campaign effectiveness on mobile sites and iPhone apps, and how people’s interaction with videos is driving customer conversion.

Mobile Marketing: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Wireless Technology

“As consumers continue to respond well to online video, more and more companies want to understand how best to leverage video to create a more engaging mobile application or mobile Web site,” said says Matt Langie, director of product marketing at Omniture.

read full story here.

Motally claims to be the only analytics firm to support analytics for apps on the iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry platforms as well as the mobile web, all in one interface.

Its export and import APIs address the needs of clients who wish to upload bulk data directly to Motally for processing.  This is especially useful for platform providers who want to send large quantities of data for analysis on behalf of their user base.

The import API can also be used by developers to send data to Motally for processing from non-natively supported platforms – effectively increasing coverage to a broader range of development platforms.

read full article here.

Tracking Mobile Ad Click Rates: Symbian Rules

We see a new report, survey or prediction everyday it seems  comparing the various mobile platforms and their performance, but most of the time they’re based on lofty projections and segmented data.  That’s why it’s nice to see data surrounding something that’s actually useful- case in point, mobile ad click-rates from the top mobile platforms.

Mobile Marketing: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Wireless Technology

Smaato, a mobile ad optimization company, has published its December 2009 report comparing the top mobile platforms — iPhone, Android, RIM, Symbian, Palm, Windows Mobile and “feature phones” — to determine mobile ad click-thru rates, OS market share, worldwide and US-based fill rates and mobile ad-network comparisons broken down into various categories.

read full article here.

ComScore, the clear leader in Web statistics and analysis, has teamed with Flurry to add real-time mobile metric data to its host of statistic reporting.  With Flurry’s mobile data in tow, comScore can provide a complete picture of how people are interacting with not only the traditional Web, but mobile as well.

The announcement comes only weeks after Flurry announced that it had merged with Pinch Media, retaining its namesake in the process.  For a company with barely a year under its belt, Flurry is making headway quickly and seems determined to become the reigning king of mobile analytics.

Mobile Marketing: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Wireless Technology

With the influx of new mobile data from Flurry, comScore will add real-time consumption data — including frequency of use, length of use, user geographic location, new vs. repeat usage and Wi-Fi vs. carrier network usage — to its mobile application data.  Judging by Flurry’s recently announced stats on the overall use of its analytics solution, comScore couldn’t have chosen a better partner.

read full article here.

I am running a mobile campaign with several different publishers, but I am not sure how to judge their performance given that there are 3 different, but important metrics we use to evaluate. Some publishers perform well in one or two metrics, but perform poorly in the 3^rd metric. Is there a way that I can distinguish between good and poor performance overall?

Let’s suppose we are running a mobile campaign for a major movie that is about to be released and we have three main actions we want people to take. We can pretend that the movie is called Gambit. The first action we want people to do is click on our Gambit banner that appears on their mobile phone (CTR). Second, we want people to Enter their phone number so they can participate in the mobile challenge. Finally, we’d like our fans to enter their friend’s phone number so they can be invited to play the Gambit challenge.

Download the free tutorial here.

Let’s say you want to reach your target market online and your key demographic is men ages 14-34. Are 400k impressions on one site better or worse at reaching your target audience than the 33k impressions on another site?

Although panel companies like Nielsen and ComScore have developed demographic and population estimates for digital publishers, traditional ratings and circulation metrics (e.g., Gross Rating Points, Target Rating Points, and Cost per Point) are generally not included in digital plans. Digital media plans are not including the denominators required to calculate brand metrics. Thus, it is impossible to know if a media plan achieves the advertiser’s campaign goals.

With that said, we can apply a shorthand technique to estimate audience metrics for digital media plans. Target audience metrics can be estimated for a digital media plan when the publisher’s site audience composition is known. Download the free tutorial on how to calculate target rate points for online advertising here.

It’s no surprise that accessing the Web is typically slower on a mobile phone than on the desktop. But some mobile sites are slower than others. With that in mind, Web research firm Gomez this month compared the mobile Web performance of more than a dozen large retailers as the holiday shopping season gets underway.

Of the 14 stores tested, Amazon’s mobile site loaded the fastest at 2.8 seconds, followed by QVC (2.9), Newegg (3.3), and Overstock and Best Buy (both at about 3.4). Bringing up the rear were Sears (6 seconds), Buy.com (6.2) and Target (7).

The average load time was 4.7 seconds — 50% slower than that of the top retailers’ traditional Web sites.

The same three companies (in the same order) also had the most reliable mobile sites, with each accessible more than 99.5% of the time. Finishing at the bottom were Buy.com (95.5%), Sears (96.3%) and 1-800-Flowers (97.7%). The average uptime rate of 98.7% was a percentage point below the retailers’ main sites.

Gomez conducted the test between Nov. 1 and Nov. 15 across different locations and different wireless operators, but all on a Motorola Razr.

“This holiday season will be the first true test of the performance of retailers’ mobile sites,” said Matt Poepsel, vice president of performance strategies at Gomez, a division of Compuware Corp., in a statement. He added that the wide disparity in results “highlights that many retailers have more work to do to improve their mobile Web performance or risk losing a potential slice of the holiday action.”

And people are not necessarily more patient on cell phones. A recent Gomez survey of 1,000 mobile Web users found that they expect sites to load as quickly or more rapidly on handheld devices compared to their home or work computer. Why they would have such high expectations for the mobile Web is unclear.

The same study also revealed that two out of three people have had trouble accessing mobile sites, with slow load times the chief complaint. Eighty-five percent will only retry a mobile Web site twice if it does not work initially, and 40% would likely visit a competitor’s site instead.

Had the survey of mobile retail sites been conducted on a smartphone rather than a feature phone like the Razr, the results may have been better. A study by Nielsen Norman Group earlier this year found that people with higher-end devices were more likely to complete mobile Web tasks than those with regular phones.