Advertising and Analytics Caught in the Cross-hairs

AT&T's move to metered data plans is going to have an interesting long-lasting effect on the Apple ecosystem. Apps that leverage services like advertisers and analytics companies who rely on transferring data to and from devices now have a new ingredient in the mix: reducing bytes transferred.

Those who have been paying attention to this already know what it's all about, but for different reasons. When we were putting together our analytics mobile SDKs at Webtrends, we were hyper-sensitive to many issues: privacy, flexibility, powerful reporting, efficiency, device battery life. It's those last two issues that forced us to be very efficient with the data we're transferring, and to take measures to only send data when it didn't interfere with the user experience in the app, or when the device battery was low.

But now the challenge is different. Mobile device users may not want to have extra services running in the background, eating up their precious bytes. And how do users keep track of this?

App developers will have new requirements of third party services, as they themselves are now having to factor in how much bandwidth their own apps are consuming. From this NYTimes article:

One of the biggest problems, app developers say, is that people are not sure how much bandwidth they are consuming with an app. AT&T customers will be able to track their data use on the company’s Web site and receive alerts when they near their quotas, but many customers are in the dark about how much data a particular app or video uses.

“They’re going to be reluctant now because they’re going to be thinking in the back of their mind that there’s a clock ticking about how long they can play this game,” said Brad Foxhoven, chief marketing officer and a founder of Ogmento, which makes augmented-reality games for the iPhone.

Developers will likely look to Apple to add new functionality to help them clearly articulate how much data is transferred, and how to be as efficient as possible with that data transfer.

HTML5 Storage and Analytics

One of the more powerful features in HTML5 is the ability to store data locally via the browser. Of course, browsers have had this functionality for a long time via cookies, but the HTML5 spec extends this concept even further, solving some additional web site use cases, and opening the door for the rapidly emerging mobile world.

Specifications
There are two mechanisms defined in the web storage spec: sessionstorage and localstorage. Sessionstorage allows for session-specific data to be stored, which can be helpful for maintaining state information that you may not want to extend into another visit. This even applies to sessions from the same visitor, within different tabs of the same browser. This is a better solution than cookies for scenarios where you want to keep transactions separate from one another. The spec notes this use case:

"For example, a user could be buying plane tickets in two different windows, using the same site. If the site used cookies to keep track of which ticket the user was buying, then as the user clicked from page to page in both windows, the ticket currently being purchased would "leak" from one window to the other, potentially causing the user to buy two tickets for the same flight without really noticing."

The localstorage mechanism, on the other hand, persists across sessions and visits.

How much storage?
The spec currently suggests a limit of 5MB per origin (domain) for this new storage. This may change as the spec continues to be revised. At 5MB, it's certainly much larger than the limit on cookies today.

Privacy
There's a decent sized section of the spec that speaks to "user tracking". There's clearly a strong concern about how this storage mechanism could be used to build user profiles and potentially track personal information. It looks like the working group developing this spec is taking privacy concerns very seriously, and are building in good safeguards.

Some thoughts
This storage would have been a great mechanism to have many years ago, but I'm not sure we were really ready for it. I think we've learned a lot over the years about privacy, and protecting personally identifiable information, and the time is much better now for such power.

The possibilities with this storage mechanism are fantastic. Google has already been making use of this functionality to help improve its apps. Apple has been a strong supporter of advancing the HTML5 spec in general.

But the rise of mobile computing has really made this mechanism important. Some very smart folks are already figuring out how to leverage localstorage to build apps that behave like a native app (eg, an iPhone or Android app), but are actually running in a browser. Check out Nextstop on your mobile device to see an example of what I mean. By pre-fetching and storing content, the experience becomes extremely rich when moving from view to view. It's quite amazing to experience it.

The Analytics connection
Analytics providers like Webtrends can obviously make use of the localstorage mechanism in creative ways. But the real thought-leadership will come with providing new analysis of usage of the storage functionality so website owners can better optimize their sites. More good opportunities for analytics providers and practitioners!

Jive acquires Filtrbox

Jive Software, who makes fabulous collaboration tools for both internal Enterprise use, and external communities announced today that they are acquiring Filtrbox.

TechCrunch notes:

Jive says that Filtrbox’s social media real-time monitoring technologies will be absorbed into Jive’s platform to help businesses and brands harness the power of the real-time web from within Jive’s collaborative software.
...
Jive is wise to boost its offerings as it is going to be competing with Salesforce’s Chatter and other social offerings. But the company is ready for the fight.

RWW notes:

How companies leverage the cloud will determine how they fare in the market. The ability to crunch large amounts of data is vital for understanding the real-time nature of how conversations flow. Jive seems to understand this and appears to be moving more toward a cloud-based strategy.

Initially, Jive will market Filtrbox through its Jive Market Engagement solution along side Radian6. Jive and Radian6 formed a partnership back in September. Here's what Jeremiah Owyang and his colleague, R "Ray" Wang had to say about the partnership.

Radian6 and Filrtrbox are essentially in the same space. it is unclear how the relationship between Jive and Radian6 will be affected by the Filtrbox purchase.

This definitely muddies the waters with Radian6. It'll be interesting to see what happens there.

Not only is this a social monitoring play, but there are analytics implications here as well. An interesting move, and one we'll watch closely! Congrats to my friends over at Jive!

Flurry Makes Another Move - Mobile App Analytics Revenue with comScore

Flurry has just announced a smart deal with comScore... Gagan Biyani over at MobileCrunch has the scoop:

Flurry wins because comScore’s sales force will sell Flurry’s data analytics software, generating an initial revenue stream for Flurry. According to Director of Community Peter Farago, clients will pay comScore to have Flurry’s SDK installed on their applications, and Flurry will make a revenue-share for each client. ComScore is adding reporting and charting software on top of Flurry’s analytics. Flurry is traditionally free for developers, but comScore is going to charge clients to use Flurry because of the additional reporting and charting they add.

This news is getting a lot of attention. As it should. This is a good deal for Flurry who, as a young company trying to make a living in the already crowded Analytics space, have figured out two revenue models already.

I agree with Om Malik though:

The way I see it, it’s only a matter of time before someone like comScore or The Nielsen Co. buys out Flurry and its rivals. It’s becoming increasingly evident that the mobile web and mobile apps are part of new usage behavior that goes beyond today’s plain-vanilla web.

There are plenty of smart folks in the Analytics and #measure space that know full well what is required to make their holistic, powerful solutions work for brands around the world. This is a wise move by both companies to make a big play in this rapidly expanding space. 2010 will be a great year for Analytics in mobile measurement. Bring it on!

HTML5 rel=noreferrer and Analytics

Phillip Lenssen over at Blogoscoped notes this interesting HTML5 nugget from Mark Pilgrim's DiveIntoHTML5 site that suggests that there will be a new relation attribute (rel="noreferrer") for links that will force browsers to drop the referrer from the header when selecting links.

This is how Mark describes it in the semantics section of his site:

rel="noreferrer" “indicates that no referrer information is to be leaked when following the link.” No shipping browser currently supports this, but support was recently added to WebKit nightlies, so it will eventually be showing up in Safari, Google Chrome, and other WebKit-based browsers. [rel="noreferrer" test case]

This is an interesting use of rel in HTML, changing the behavior of the browser. Especially a default behavior like this that has been around since the stone age (early stone tablets had a referrer of course...).

The impact to the Analytics community could be quite far-reaching. Referrer information is obviously quite important to a lot of base reporting dimensions. We'll all be interested to see if this specification will actually make it into HTML5.

Nextstop Nicely Bridges Apps and HTML5

Robert Scoble has shared an interview with Carl and Adrian over at Nextstop. They have put together a slick iPhone app (and Android, etc) based on HTML5. The app looks fantastic.

What's slick about the app is how they've leveraged new browser functionality. They note what they've done via their blog...here's a synopsis of the cool stuff:

The technologies we're using include:

• ApplicationCache: We've built our application using Javascript to manage page transitions, so the core HTML, Javascript, and CSS is only loaded once. We're using the HTML5 ApplicationCache to speed startup time on subsequent loads by caching Javascript and CSS so that these resources are cached for subsequent application loads.


• Geolocation: We're utilizing Geolocation to get your current physical position in the browser to show nearby content.


• localStorage: As you browse the application, we try to prefetch content aggressively so that any time you click, the content needed for the next page has already been downloaded. This is possible because we store all prefetched content locally on the phone using the localStorage object. This also means that as you browse to content you've already seen, no additional network requests are needed because that content has already been stored.


• Google maps v3: Google has been working on a new version of the Maps API, specifically optimized for performance on mobile devices. We've found this to be a substantial improvement over Maps 2, and a reasonable alternative for a native maps implementation.


• iphone-photo-picker: One of the key capabilities of the iPhone that isn't yet available through the browser is access to the camera and local photo library. To bridge this gap, we've built (and are open sourcing) a small helper application that exposes a urlscheme (photopicker://) that can be called from any web application to invoke the camera or photo library, and then will POST the selected image to a URL you specify.

That last item is very cool. Extending standard functionality of mobile devices into the browser is a huge enabler for everyone. Well done guys.

As Marshall noted yesterday,

Could mobile web apps challenge the dominance of native apps on the iPhone? That's an active debate.

The good news for the analytics world is that the standard tagging tracking methodology for these high-performance mobile web apps is fairly well known. However, there is new work to be done as we figure out what's important to track as new APIs are exposed, and mobile web app owners become more proficient with them.

Apple Shutting Down iTunes Connect During Holidays

File this under "only Apple could get away with this". Apple notes that they are shutting down their iTunes Connect environment from December 23rd - 28th, 2009.

Over 100k apps on their App Store, with many more on the way each week, and they have the nerve to shut down their App developer management and reporting tools - during the busiest App season of the year (for some). Perhaps they could have gotten away with this over the last couple of years, but this seems like the tipping-point year where there are a lot more folks relying on this environment for their livelihood. After all...there are analytics involved here!

Jolie over at RWW notes:

So, once again, during what may be some app developers' biggest sales spike of the entire year, they will not have access to information on sales performance or other metrics, and they won't be able to tweak their marketing materials or create new incentives as the year's biggest gift-giving holiday approaches.

Developers...get everything together so you're not caught flat-footed!

Developing Mobile Apps - Things To Know

VentureBeat blogger Paul Boutin has a great follow up article from Wednesday’s DiscoveryBeat 2009 conference. I wish I could have been there...it sounds like there were some good takeaways.

My favorites from the list below:

the current market is under-measured
You need $0.00 to promote an app company now
It costs $3 to acquire an Apple app customer through advertising

Paul's list of "11 things I didn’t know about app development":

1. The majority of app developers don’t pay for market research before they design and build their apps. Yet this kind of research is inexpensive and vastly improves the likeliness of creating hits rather than misses.
2. Apple App Store downloads are growing 20 times faster than iTunes music/video downloads. Even paid apps outrun iTunes growth by a factor of seven.
3. Social network apps, compared to other types, have shown a relatively low frequency of usage and a low retention rate after 90 days. Games are where it’s at.
4. Super-analyst Mary Meeker at Morgan Stanley says that despite the buzz over anything mobile, the current market is under-measured, and future growth underestimated.
5. You need $0.00 to promote an app company now. For example, Sibblingz will distribute your game to Facebook, the iPhone, and the Web without charging you anything upfront. They’ll take a cut of revenue as it comes in.
6. Reach and revenue are nice to have, but retention — getting users to keep launching your app — is the key to success.
7. 90% of social game leader Zynga’s revenue comes from virtual goods sold within games and on social networks, not from advertising.
8. It costs $3 to acquire an Apple app customer through advertising. That’s more than the customer will spend buying the game. (Notably, no one in the audience disputed this stat.)
9. Most app discovery comes from viral word of mouth among customers, not from people searching app stores for something to download.
10. That said, mass marketing still works. RockYou spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a month “buying users” with ads. Zynga spent possibly millions marketing its hit Farmville on Facebook and elsewhere. (Zynga GM Bill Mooney was in the room and didn’t dispute this.)
11. Big brands like Mountain Dew are often presumed by tech industry workers to damage the credibility of anything they touch. In reality, they can be as powerful as app stores and game networks for popularizing an app. It never hurts to talk to them.

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.

Flash Tracking (and good music too!)

The creative folks over at Coke continue to innovate with their web properties. They are very heavy into Flash, and as usual, have some very fun marketing programs in place (check out the Virtual Thirst campaign which has been using MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and Second Life to reach out...wow!).

They have a music player featuring "fresh new music" with some great tunes. The Flash-based player (which undocks from the site so you can continue listening if you leave their site) is instrumented to send analytics data for various activities (start, pause, next song, song rating, etc.). Very smart use of analytics.

Disclosure: Coke uses WebTrends for analytics...but I haven't been a part of their implementation...I just stumbled on their site while looking for something else!

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics, flash

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Non-Profit Year 2 - New and Improved Analytics too

Last week we put the finishing touches on our updated online "store" for parents to buy school supplies for their child(ren) through Schoolhouse Supplies. This year we added 5 more Portland Elementary schools to the program. We made a few important modifications to our site to accommodate the additional schools, plus we're now offering a method for parents to donate directly to Schoolhouse Supplies if they'd like.

As I've noted previously, we are taking advantage of some great technology to pull this together. We're using .NET on the front-end, with credit cards processed directly through API's setup by AuctionPay, then each order is stored (as a closed opportunity, with account and contact records added) in Salesforce.com. Of course, Analytics and Marketing Warehouse data brought to you by WebTrends. All of these tools are provided free to our non-profit...many thanks to these companies!

We also made a few analytics changes this year. We updated our collection of WebTrends data to include:

• Capturing form information
• Capturing button selections to give us a better feel for usage of some of the features
• We changed around our tracking of scenario steps for more streamlined reporting in the WebTrends Warehouse
  
• Capturing the Salesforce Contact ID value we create for each customer when we add the customer into Salesforce, and collecting it

That last item is particularly slick. After a successful credit card authorization, we insert records into Salesforce, then query back out the new Contact ID and place it in a meta variable for our WebTrends javascript to pick up on the confirmation page. Now we can easily pull our WebTrends Marketing Warehouse data and Salesforce data together for some slick reporting. Cool!

More to come on this as the orders start coming in!

(side note - many thanks to Nate, Anu, Mike and Jeff for their volunteer hours on this!)

Filed in: analytics, salesforce.com, nonprofit, web+analytics

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More Thoughts On Page Views

Steve Rubel continued the discussion of the replacement of the Page View as the metric of choice in our industry. He suggests that Events, Unique Visitors and Time Spent are likely candidates for replacement metrics (with Events and Time Spent as the two likely leaders).

The article is worth a read...as are the comments.

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics

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Engagement and Machine Tags

Note the 8th item on Fred's list of things learned from Flickr:

8) Engagement metrics like comments, favorites, views, can and should be used to drive discovery (the most interesting algorithm)

I'd love to hear more about "discovery" as an engagement metric. Perhaps EricP can mull this one over a bit.

The other item on his list that is very intriguing to me is #10:

10) Machine tagging (autotagging) is the next big thing in web 2.0

Machine tags sound like a very interesting next step in tagging, and a smart extension to the tagging process. More good consumer generated content that seems quite ripe for analytics tools to leverage to better understand visitors. Great stuff.

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics

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Analytics Tools In The News

A couple of newsy items in our analytics space:

1) Martin pointed me to the news that WidgetBox has released an analytics tool for WidgetBox customers. This is a smart idea, and very helpful for those using WidgetBox. From their post on why analytics matter:

With our Syndication Metrics, you, the widget developer, can assess the popularity and effectiveness of your widgets at a very fine level of granularity. We think it¹s like Google Analytics but for widgets. Now, you can track the spread of your widgets across the Internet and identify your biggest users are as well as most influential. You can also figure out the external triggers driving subscriptions, and make adjustments to maximize your widget’s exposure. You can identify which sites are driving the most traffic through your widget and forge strategic relationships. For the first time, the fog will lift and you’ll clearly be able to see which of your widget efforts are truly working.

2) The fine folks over at Performancing have sold off their analytics tool to PayPerPost. I really like the Performancing analytics tool. They were the first to put out a simple RSS feed of analytics data that was easy to use. Here's how my data looks in an RSS feed if you're interested.

I'll be interested to see what happens with this. PayPerPost definitely needs analytics data to provide to their customers, so it makes sense they'd pull something together.

Performancing keeps their ad network and PFF (performancing for firefox), which are terrific assets. PFF is now ScribeFire, the ad network will be renamed soon.

Update: The deal is off...wow, what a turnaround...Nick notes that they can no longer run the metrics tool and that the code will be given to open source. Best of luck to the Performancing team!

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics, performancing

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