Let's get rid of the traditional online measurement methodology for mobile campaigns and get real about what we can measure and what those measurements mean in mobile.    Let’s face it, many mobile campaigns today are very poorly targeted, capped, and measured because doing this right is difficult.  At the same time, brand managers are faced with justifying their spend in this new channel. The lack of standard, reliable, and insightful measurement is hindering the growth of mobile advertising. To add to this confusion, many mobile ad networks and technology companies are making promises that exceed the ability of the technology and further confuse the marketplace.

Mobile Campaign Measurement is Broken
So let’s start with what isn’t working.  First, using the click through rate as the de facto standard for measuring the success of a mobile campaign is too simplistic of a measurement.  Mobile display advertising should encourage click-interactivity but not necessarily click-through events.  In fact, a successful rich media ad campaign may result in negligible click through rates.  This is especially true in mobile.  Mobile technology provides the capability to launch brand videos on embedded players, to directly initiate a call to the advertiser, or to auto-locate and route users to nearby stores.  In addition, rich media expandable panels provide brand interactivity and information without requiring the user to leave the mobile site.  Be warned: click-throughs launch separate landing pages which can take much longer to load on mobile networks.  This can quickly turn a positive advertiser (and publisher) experience into a negative one.

Mobile ad networks and rich media vendors dipping their toes into mobile are focused on the scale of their business and leveraging their existing know-how’s.  It is not surprising that many of their ads do not take advantage of the unique capabilities of mobile devices; nor do they adequately handle the challenges of mobile ad serving.  They tend to drive users to micro-sites, and thus they try to focus your attention on CTR as their go-to measurement benchmark.  While CTR it is important to their business, it is not necessarily important to yours.
The next challenge is audience measurement.  Every mobile technology provider is using their own way of determining unique visitors in mobile, which aren’t necessarily as accurate as the way it is done on the web using cookies. Online, due to frequent deletion of cookies on browsers and access from multiple computers, the unique visitors are overstated about 2.5 times in the server logs.  This creates a vast overstatement of audience reach.  Early on in mobile, there certainly have been some issues causing the understating the audience. Like when IP addresses were considered unique user identifiers by some or when page and image caching on the network were poorly understood. Still today, impression beacons (small invisible gif) are used to track ad impressions on the server but a good portion of mobile devices misbehave and won’t download the darn pixel.

This and various other issues caused each mobile technology company to figure out their own way to measure based on more granular parameters.  Now that cookies are better supported on mobile, we could move toward a more standard methodology, but again face the challenge of audience overstatement due to a variety of complex factors like gateway cookies vs. device-side cookies, carrier HTTP headers and more. 

Finally, while mobile advertising is starting to look and feel more like online advertising with rich media - beyond-the-banner - campaigns, online ad tracking and measurement simply doesn’t work for mobile.  For example, many online rich media companies utilize JavaScript in their ad forms.  Yet in mobile, not every phone supports JavaScript.  In fact, the BlackBerry, which represents 56 percent of the smartphone market in the U.S. (IDC) does not come enabled for JavaScript.  Mobile phones also handle video ads differently from online browsers.  While online browsers stream video, iPhone and other smart phones utilize video downloads, requiring a whole different method of measuring views. 

Mobile is unique and its measurement needs to be also.  Metrics around mouse-hover times or other online standards are meaningless in mobile.  It takes a mobile expert to figure out what can be measured in mobile and how to do it.

What Needs to Be Fixed
The time is ripe for re-inventing the ad format, placement and measurement of campaigns.  A mobile ad format needs to be interactive, captivating, rich, and leverage the medium – not just simple banners.   Ad placement should take advantage of the mobile display size without annoying or confusing the customer.  Measurements need to detail the interactivity with the ad and explain the corrections applied due to device form factor and technology.  Measurements need to accurately show that a campaign reached the promised target segments.

At Crisp Wireless, we are focusing on solving these issues because the mobile channel is the perfect medium for premium ad campaigns.  Contact our team to see demonstrations and to hear more about the innovative ways to create and measure mobile campaigns.