Demystifying Mobile, Part III

Mobile marketing measurement is important, but don’t panic

400px-The_HitcHitchhiker's_Guide In the third of our three-part series, Paul Cushman, Director of Mobile Sales Strategy at Yahoo!, outlines the importance of measurement in any mobile strategy and offers a simple formula for doing it right. For Part I, click here. For Part II, click here.

I’m shocked by the number of clients who start a mobile campaign with no idea how they are going to measure success. I’m not talking necessarily about goals, as this is a new channel to many brands and setting benchmarks is a legitimate and relevant approach at the start.

But make sure you are measuring and that you talk to your mobile advertising vendors about this. There are good in-house and third-party solutions out there that can improve the data a campaign generates.

Why is this important? Say the client comes in and says “I want an iPhone app!” (Let’s ignore the fact that this is akin to walking into the agency and saying “I want to do radio ads” without first asking whether or not you should even be doing radio).

Instead of jumping in an spending a load of money on production in a medium you have never marketed in before, why not run a series of test campaigns in mobile, with various offers and simple landing pages and sites (very cheap to build) and see if the audience that engages with you in mobile is even on an iPhone? What if they’re on Blackberries? Or T-Mobile?

Don’t get me wrong: the iPhone is a fantastic device and is responsible for an explosion in mobile Web adoption. But this is marketing and apps are not easy to build, so you should also consider whether you can achieve more, for less investment, and quicker, without one.

After all, the CTR for mobile web is 135 percent higher than it is on apps.

Parting thoughts: Don’t Panic
Have you ever read Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy?” In this smart, comic sci-fi novel, Adams imagined the first, true, universal mobile device—a fictional proto-iPhone, if you will—one that offered access to almost all knowledge, anywhere, anytime.“Don’t Panic” was the advice on its front cover.

So allow me to give you my guide to the mobile universe, starting with the dirty little secret about Paul Cushman’s job. Keep this on the QT, but:

This mobile thing? It’s the Internet, just a little bit smaller. Got that? Let’s take a step back and look at this mobile thing shall we?

Portals and publishers have these things called sites.
They offer advertising on these sites in the form of display and search ads.
Users click on these ads, and go to an advertiser’s site or landing page.
We track these clicks and behavior, see what drove that performance and buy more of the good stuff. We call this optimization.

Has anybody seen this movie before?

So, don’t panic: you know 80 percent or more of this already. Just focus on defining your strategy, see where mobile fits, keep it simple, track everything, and see what works

Because you know what? It’s about the message, not the medium.

—Paul Cushman, Director of Mobile Sales Strategy, Yahoo!

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