Transparency is sorely lacking in the still immature mobile advertising ecosystem. Most mobile ad networks cannot even tell you the volume of impressions and clicks that they generate in a given country.  You have to rely on trial and error to discover what bang you’re gonna get for your buck. (As a sidenote, most ad networks price in US Dollars now so people can compare prices globally; shame they still think all advertisers live in the same timezone as they do too). And none of them can give you details about the segmentation of their network’s user base.

So it’s a breath of fresh air to see BuzzCity take some first steps in the right direction with the release of their Campaign Planner tool to help advertisers better understand the audience they are addressing and target their campaigns accordingly.  For any country you select, the campaign planner gives detailed information about the number of impressions per month, average campaign CPC, and a breakdown of traffic by mobile operator, device type and features, and even gender, age and more detailed location information where available.  However I suspect this information is based on the MyGamma social network which forms the core of the BuzzCity publisher network … but is not necessarily representative of total network traffic.

The next step is to let advertisers actually target their campaigns using the same criteria.  But this is difficult to do when many publishers on an ad network are unable to provide this information.  This will come with time.

In the meantime a simple but sorely needed step forward would be to actually calculate in advance the clicks that a campaign can be expected to generate in a given country for a given bid price.  All mobile ad networks have enough data to work this out.  Why not share it with advertisers so they can better understand the dynamics of the system?