GoMo News today posted an article I wrote calling for the industry to be more open with mobile metrics.  Here it is again:

Mobile advertisers face a big problem: Fragmentation.  Not of technology, but of information.

Say you’re one of the majority of mobile advertisers wishing to drive traffic to their mobile internet site or mobile app by advertising on other mobile sites and apps.  How do you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns?  The agencies and ad networks alone can’t tell you. A high exposure rate is meaningless unless you get clicks, and yet a high click through rate is not always a good thing.  Your site analytics alone can’t tell you because you don’t know if those high conversion rates came at a prohibitive price.

So at a minimum you need to track spend on the ads and conversions on your site / app for each and every campaign you run.  And this is where fragmentation laughs in your face and turns your marketing team into copy-pasting slaves.  The problem is threefold:

-        duplication of reporting from ad networks and agencies

-        duplication of conversion tracking on your site/app

-        stitching it together

Firstly, you’ve got to aggregate ad performance data in a meaningful way from multiple ad networks and agencies.  Some of the more forward-thinking ones are realising this and planning an API to give their clients direct access to their data (I wrote about this recently: Ad networks: emancipate your clients data!).  But precious few of them are doing this and it will probably be years before they all do, by which time many will have been acquired or sidelined.  Meantime, you have to navigate your way through many different, sometimes complex, sometimes downright awful reporting interfaces to manually extract your data.

Secondly, for those ad networks that offer ‘conversion tracking’ features, you need to integrate their tracking code into your site or app in order to see full CPA performance data for each ad running on their network.  This sounds like a great idea, until you realise how many separate tracking codes you’re going to need to integrate to cover all the ad networks.  Once you’ve got more than a couple of these ‘trackers’ running, response times are going to suffer.  Don’t worry though, hardly any offer this yet anyway.  You could use an analytics provider to track conversions instead, but you’ll need separate tracker codes for your mobile sites (Admob, Bango and Omniture are the most well-known with Google only recently releasing a mobile analytics service) and for your apps (the recent merger of Flurry and Pinch Media is looking a good bet here but still does not cover all the device base).

These two issues compound the problem of how to stitch it all together.  Obviously there’s the sheer effort of just having to collect and capture common-denomination, comparable data from all these sources into one place and then match it all up.  Then there are time zone and currency differences.  Nearly all ad networks and some analytics providers think you live just up the road from them.  How are you supposed to compare ad spend in the US delivered by an ad network headquartered in India with conversion data from your analytics provider in the UK?

For me, there is one clear and relatively simple solution to this problem:  Ad networks and analytics providers give your clients their data in a time zone independent format and liberate it with an API. That way, they can easily combine and compare ad performance end to end for each and every one of their campaigns.  The advertisers and ad agencies will be the final deciders on this, and they will choose those companies in the ecosystem that are able to give them the data they need whenever and however they want it.