Mobile Apps - Changing the game

Apple didn't invent the mobile application. Nor did they invent the concept of a store for applications. But they have changed the game when it comes to how we think a mobile device can be just about anything you want it to be.

NYTimes author Jenna Wortham has a great article today about how Apple has changed the game in the mobile app space. The momentum is amazing, and it's not stopping anytime soon.

The whole article is worth a read...here a are a few nuggets of facts:

• Apple has over 100,000 apps in the App Store today (there are 14,000 for the Android, Blackberry has 3,000, Palm has 500 for the Pre webOS platform, Microsoft has 800 in their Marketplace)
• Apple receives over 10,000 application submissions each week (that doesn't really jibe with the total number of apps...this may include updates? or are there many apps that don't make it through? or are there many more than 100,000 apps out there today?)
• Apple keeps 30 percent of the revenue earned by any App Store program (wow!), the rest is kept by the developer
• Apple says it has sold 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches
• Analysts estimate that the App Store generates as much as $1B in revenue for Apple and its developers

Mobile App Analytics - 5-fold Growth Ahead?

eMarketer came out with a report earlier this year articulating Mobile Applications: Moving Beyond Apple. One of the big data points they refer to is from Piper Jaffray, who estimate that spending on consumer and business applications will grow 5-fold by 2012. From a $2.8B market this year, into a $13B+ market.

I can see how the consumer side of things will definitely grow, but I don't really get the spending growth on the business side. I do think the growth of the usage of business applications will grow tremendously, but will business pay for it? Or will it just come for free as part of their product consumption? Business will just expect that your app or service or software will run on their mobile devices.

(via BitHeads)

New Twitter Search Functionality and Analytics

A couple of notes for the Analytics community regarding Twitter's cool new search interface...

New URL
There's a new search engine referral URL as part of Twitter's new interface. You'll want to update those search engine configurations to be on the lookout for it, and note the additional parameters too. Here's what the referring URL looks like from their new sidebar search:

http://twitter.com/timeline/search?q=searchphrase&source=sidebar&category=search

I see one other category in there for the new "trends" they've added just below the search bar, but in my limited testing, the referring URL didn't always reflect the "trend" selected, which I hope they fix.

I also note that if you've searched for something, that search phrase stays in the URL, even if you go somewhere else on the site (example: I went to my @elbpdx area and clicked on a link in there and the /search?=searchphrase was still present in the referrer...I imagine this is a bug that they'll fix...)

Expect more changes
The URL portends some additional goodies that they must have up their sleeves. What additional "source" items will we be seeing? What else are they going to do with the "category" field? I'm looking forward to seeing more...

Twitter Analytics

It looks like Twitter is starting to get serious with how to monetize all of that amazing information they are collecting. According to Kevin Thau, Twitter's Director of Business Development:

"We can measure the tweets," he says. "We're trying to figure out what are the appropriate metrics around engagement and how to convey those."

Jeremy Owyang was also interviewed for that Forbes article, noting when asked about whether there's any money to be made:

"When it comes to enterprises, absolutely," says Jeremiah Owyang, a social computing analyst with Forrester Research (nasdaq: FORR - news - people ). "I just got off a call with a client that's asking about how to engage on Twitter. There's definitely interest."

I think Twitter rocks, and will continue to change how we communicate and share information. I use it to bookmark information now (so sorry delicious...), as well as staying in touch with the evangelists in the social media industry and the analytics industry. And with this new development of measurement coming from Twitter, I imagine we'll all be watching these industries get closer together as we figure out how best to integrate information.

Perhaps it's just a conspiracy?

Perhaps this is just Google messing with us. I searched on "web analytics" and received the hashed up response above, and obviously others have stumbled on this too. How many individuals in our industry (SEO, Web Analytics, SEM) have spent (wasted?) time figuring this out in the past few days? And their only response thus far has been to point us to a blog post from 2006?

It sure seems like they could be a bit more transparent on this.

Search and Best Results Analytics

Prefetching content is a clever way to speed up your browsing experience. Simply put, given certain conditions, your browser can prefetch web pages, so when you do visit those pages, they are already in your cache, thus speeding the time to display them in your browser.

Google started prefetching content for Firefox users in March of '05. Note that this doesn't work in IE (although StumbleUpon does), nor even in Chrome (although Chrome does prefetch/pre-resolve DNS information). They don't prefetch for all searches...only those where there's one result that has a high likelyhood of being selected...the "best result".

Here's how Google's search prefetching works. You perform a search, say for "apple". You get back something like these results.

Behind the scenes, google has also added an extra tag to one of the links instructing the browser to prefetch the Apple site (again, only Firefox does it) of http://www.apple.com/

For those who want more details, the tag which generates the prefetch includes: link rel="prefetch"

And to tell you maybe even a little more than you want to know (but highlights an important fact), when the browser does prefetch this information, it doesn't fetch any additional objects referenced on the page. Only the HTML content of the link. (yep...if you're using a javascript tagging solution for your analytics, you are not capturing that prefetch visit...)

Now, how does Google determine what link to prefetch? What if I really wanted info on the actual fruit? Google doesn't divulge how they actually determine when to insert a link, I think it's an interesting metric that is worth investigating. I think of it this way. Google is basically saying, "I have a pretty good idea what you're going to do next, so I'm going to make that next site you're going to visit a little faster for you".

We all pay pretty good money to GYM (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) and others to send search traffic to us. We also spend money on tools to help us better understand what search terms folks use to get to us even when we're not paying GYM and others. And of course, we all track this important information by paying WebTrends and others for excellent tools to make sense of all of our efforts.

However, unless you've made plans to intercept this prefetch information, you are not collecting this important data. Why is it important? Only Google knows how many times your site is returned in search results. You only know:

1. How many times it was returned in paid results
2. How many times a visitor clicked through to your site in search results (paid or organic)

What's missing is how many times your site was returned in organic searching (does anyone know how to get absolute search info from GYM?). And what would also be excellent to know is how many times Google thought that the visitor was going to select your site - based on the best result. Again, here's what I'm thinking:

Google thinks a visitor is interested in your site. This tells you:

1. The visitor searched for something that likely would have led them to you.
2. Google thought it was relevant enough to even prefetch the content for the visitor.
3. The visitor may or may not actually make it to your site (why or why not?).
4. Which search terms were actually deemed relevant enough to make Google think your site was the right destination?

Ok, so how can you capture this information? If you're using web logs, you need to make sure you're capturing request headers so you can pull out a special header that is sent with each request and put it in your logs. The header is: X-Moz: prefetch

If you're using tagging, here's an approach that I put together a couple of years ago so we could watch this traffic over time: intercept the request and generate a request to your Web Analytics vendor data collection environment. I'd be happy to show you how to do this if you're interested.

Now you can track this traffic over time, and per visitor (depending on your WA solution you're using). What are these "best results" that these visitors are searching for? Did they actually select your site? Assuming you want them to visit your site, how might you change things so they do reach you? If they do make it to your site, which paths did they follow? Which scenarios did they fall into?

Questions? Thoughts? Comments?

Google Analytics Event Tracking

Google continues to do a good job of adding additional functionality within their Google Analytics framework. Their Event Tracking is well done (with the usual capacity/scale issues). I do like how well they've laid out the tracking code, and even threw in a couple of extras in there (time tracking and mouseover tracking).

Of course, WebTrends and others have had this functionality for years now, and have much deeper customization options...but I am biased.

A couple of notes on GA's event tracking:

1. Bounce rates will change. They are treating events as additional "requests", so if you have a single-page visit with an event triggered (automatically or through interaction), it's no longer considered a single-page visit.
2. There are limits to how many events they will count. This is a free service afterall, but they note that in addition to the other report limits within GA, there is a limit to the number of requests per visit they will include in the reports. Watch how you implement events!