Despite the ubiquity of these devices, marketers continue to struggle to effectively monetize the mobile channel. It’s time to step back, look at what makes mobile different and come up with some fresh thinking.

Mobile devices aren’t little desktops. They’re not even little laptops. Too much of the advertising taking place on these devices is rooted in what worked on the traditional Web. Banners on mobile browsers are for the birds. Tiny fonts and big fingers are a terrible combination. How many times have you inadvertently clicked an ad while simply trying to scroll or stretch or pinch a page? It’s great for click through rates, even if unintentionally.

Creativity takes the cake. When we see something novel we notice; it’s human nature. Marketers get this and they’re increasingly trying new ways to grab our attention in the mobile world. In-app advertising is a first step but a lot of it simply relies on what are essentially still banners. But some brands are doing interesting things with apps themselves – either as stand-alone programs or as part of a broader campaign.

One device, many use cases. The fact that we can talk about banner ads in the mobile browser, in-app ads and app-based campaigns speaks to the variety of use cases that exist on mobile. Within seconds a user can take a photo, customize it using Instagram, share it on Facebook and move on to browse the Web. In virtually every use case there is an opportunity for brands to engage.

A universal view of me and of you. One of the challenges with the various use cases described above is recognizing that the same user is performing them all. It may seem elementary but marketers have no way to bridge between the mobile Web and apps when it comes to recognizing their audience. The result is wasted impressions, the inability to do frequency capping and a less than optimal user experience.

Performance is paramount. Marketing on mobile devices is still marketing, and a big part of marketing is managing hundreds of billions of impressions on hundreds of millions of devices in tiny slivers of a second. While speed is critical, longevity is important too as it means customers can be confidently reached for an extended period of time.

Privacy, privacy, privacy. Marketers have played fast and loose with customer data, skirting best practices and turning a deaf ear to consumers’ requests for greater privacy protection. Mobile offers a fresh start – based on the concept of privacy-by-design – for the industry to give consumers the protection they want while still providing marketers with the data they need to create relevant and respectful relationships.

Mobile is exciting. It’s promising, fun, personal, immediate, intimate and it’s everywhere. Now is the time for marketers to create engaging connections with their customers that are just as exciting and promising and personal and fun as the devices they run on. It’s time for marketers to look at their audiences, the ecosystem and the available technology to deliver relevant content for engaging consumer experiences.

Wrong.

Creating your mobile app is the easy part of the process. Actually keeping your users engaged and willing to open your app again and again is the big challenge.

Mobile analytics company Flurry says that on average, 54% of users will open your mobile app again 30 days after the initial download. But as you might expect, the longer users have your app, the less they’ll be using it: After 90 days, only 35% of mobile users will still be using the app, according to the firm.

So how do you keep your users engaged and continually looking to your app for information and entertainment? Here are a few tips to keep in mind before and after app creation to ensure that your users get the most out of your app:

1. Leverage analytics: Analytics are hugely important to the success of any mobile app, as it can tell you who is using your app, which users are leaving, and what improvements you need to make to keep users clicking that icon on their home screen.
2. A/B testing: There are several techniques out there to test various alternatives for your user interface and user behavior. My preferred method is A/B testing; it helps you determine which experience is best suited for your users and has served Conduit well in the past as we’ve developed apps.
3. Push notifications: Push notifications are a powerful way to engage users, so long as you don’t overuse them. Location-specific push notifications are especially making waves as an effective way to drive sales and engagement by targeting specific regions.
4. Gamification: This may be a more sophisticated technique than those I’ve mentioned above, but gamifying your app — be it creating contests and leaderboards, or offering virtual currency — is one of the most successful ways to keep users enthralled with your app. Hey, it’s worked for Foursquare and GetGlue.
5. Feedback: Perhaps the most effective way to figure out how to keep users coming back to your app is, quite simply, to just ask them! Collect and answer feedback from your users via reviews about your app, or even from within your app.
6. Don’t forget to update: Your app is always a work in progress. Keep enhancing your app and optimizing anywhere that’s needed in order to improve the user experience.

There are many other ways to keep users engaged with your app for a longer period of time — ads within Facebook apps on mobile devices are fast becoming a preferred method — but the tips above should be enough to get you started down the right path. What other ways have helped your app succeed? Let me know in the comments section, and let’s continue the conversation!

Follow Li-at Karpel Gurwicz on Twitter at @LiatKarpel

For those already on board with mobile advertising, make sure to run with Rich Media creative. Mobile is all about engagement; so don’t be shy about using the native functions of the smartphone to engage consumers with your brand, products and offers.

• Use push notifications to let users know when they are close to your store.
  • GPS locators are great for retail stores—brands like Starbucks, Target and Goodyear use this creative functionality to drive in-store traffic.
• Include the option to set calendar reminders.
  • This functionality is great for entertainment clients that want to remind fans to watch upcoming movies and shows, or for retailers to remind customers that a sale is starting or announce that a new product is available.
• If you have an app, increase interactivity by implementing a rewards or loyalty program.
  • Consumers will be more excited to keep spending with you if they are getting something in return.
• Apply audio and video to grab attention and make your offer more appealing.
  • Audio and video complement cross-platform campaigns, especially for new product launches as they can align with radio and television advertising respectively.

Also, make sure ads are built in HTML5 when possible—this will lower the cost of creative and you will be able to run the ad on both mobile and display.

Outside of advertising on mobile platforms, there are two distinct ways for brands to better connect with mobile consumers—mobile optimized sites and branded apps. Any brand ignoring mobile optimization risks losing revenue as 61% of customers who visit a mobile unfriendly site are likely to go to a competitor’s site and 57% of consumers will not recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site[iii]. And, although users prefer to shop on the mobile web, apps are important too.  This is especially true for retailers; 43% of mobile consumers have downloaded retail apps to shop[iv]. As mobile usage continues to grow, so will these numbers.

Developing a mobile marketing strategy can seem overwhelming. Some savvy mobile platforms will create alternatives to the above options as an added value if your creative development resources are limited. Instead of going without a mobile presence at all in Q4, partner with someone who can solve your cross-platform media needs.  The efforts will keep your brand top of mind among mobile audiences and boost sales as m-commerce continues to skyrocket.

The scale of adoption in web analytics highlights the direct benefits businesses see in measuring site activity — including key metrics like visitors, visits and page views, traffic source metrics like keywords and referring sites, as well as optimization metrics like conversion rates. And as companies have introduced services around mobile analytics, they’ve tried to create similar context for mobile measurement.

But while using similar metrics across web and mobile may feel more familiar for many businesses, it also discounts what makes mobile unique: location. Location data on the web is coarse, and limited to dimensions like country, state, and city — location analytics for mobile is different, in that it allows for a level of precision down to meters, and context down to place.

Inventory Availability Based on Location
Mobile location data, if used appropriately (and in connection with mobile analytics), can help drive revenue for both the publisher and the marketer by enabling mobile inventory to be sold against more granular, premium locations.

The most valuable inventory in mobile is going to be associated with geofences around neighborhoods in a city, a particular category of businesses, or a single chain of businesses. When using geofences, a more granular set of location analytics is required to identify this high-value inventory. By understanding the availability of mobile users nearby a certain category of business like banks or specific businesses such as Walmart, Home Depot, or Starbucks, a salesperson can go out into market and confidently sell against that inventory. Without this level of detail, a salesperson risks not being able to sell this high-value inventory, or could sell against a geofence with limited impressions, leaving money on the table and creating a less-than-optimal outcome for the client.

Media Buying Based on Location
When planning a media buy, many marketers use services like Nielsen, Quantcast, and Comscore to get data on prospective inventory. Many of these services have limited data on mobile, so when making a mobile buy the media buyer becomes more reliant upon the internal reports of publishers and ad networks to understand details such as the audience composition, content, and targeting.

What is missing from the current data available to media buyers is what makes mobile unique: the ability to apply place context to a media buy. If an app sees 38% of interactions occur near a specific restaurant, that means 380 out of 1,000 impressions have the ability to change behavior in that moment. When you compare that to desktop inventory, a restaurant banner ad is much less likely to motivate a viewer to leave their computer, get into their car, and drive to that restaurant. The inability to apply value to the key differentiator of mobile (location) is part of the reason why mobile CPMs are still at 20% of desktop CPMs (Internet Trends, Mary Meeker, May 2012).

It is critical that media buyers push mobile inventory sources to provide location analytics that enable them to make buying decisions based on the unique features associated with mobile. By identifying the features unique to mobile, the media buyer can better identify opportunities for their clients to effectively move dollars to mobile inventory.

As an industry, we’re still in the early stages of mobile media buying and selling, where information is paramount and early adopters will be rewarded. Traditional metrics like visitors, audience, and content play a role in mobile, but location analytics is what quantifies the unique value of mobile for publishers and marketers.

This article initially appeared on Street Fight.

David Shim is the Founder and CEO of Placed, a location analytics company.  By connecting the physical and digital worlds, Placed has created a new class of analytics focused on location.  Prior to Placed, David has held leadership roles in product, marketing, and operations at Quantcast, WebTrends, Farecast, and Razorfish.

With that in mind and a long fourteen hour flight to Sydney from Seattle ahead of me, I decided to watch the Oscar-nominated Moneyball.

Does art imitate life or is it the other way around?  Given Moneyball is based on the nonfiction best seller by author Michael Lewis, the answer doesn’t much matter; that is unless you look outside of baseball.

Watching Moneyball, I was struck by how similar the plot is to what we see going on with mobile marketers around the world.   Read some key dialogue from the movie:

“There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening. And this leads people who run Major League Baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams. I apologize.” (Peter Brand)

“Go on.” (Billy Beane)

“Okay. People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn't be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs. You're trying to replace Johnny Damon. The Boston Red Sox see Johnny Damon and they see a star who's worth seven and half million dollars a year. When I see Johnny Damon, what I see is... is... an imperfect understanding of where runs come from. The guy's got a great glove. He's a decent leadoff hitter. He can steal bases. But is he worth the seven and half million dollars a year that the Boston Red Sox are paying him? No. No. Baseball thinking is medieval. They are asking all the wrong questions.” (Peter Brand)

Misjudge?   Mismanage?  Imperfect understanding?  Asking the wrong questions?  Mobile marketers I’ve talked to around the world are saying similar things:

“We have little insight into our customers and what drives their behavior.”

“Our campaigns are driven by “gut.”  It’s not that we have an imperfect understanding of what drives behavior, we have little to no understanding.”

“We are asking segment questions to get to simple answers.  We deal in averages, like households with 2.2 children, and know our generalizing of customers is a mistake."

Mobile operators know they’ve been relying way to long on the ‘old school’ ways of marketing.  Many marketers are like Grady Fusion, the old time scout for the Oakland A’s, running marketing campaigns based on heuristics honed by prior success and absent of hard data and a focus on the right metrics.

Does this sound familiar?

1)      Define a target audience based on gut

2)      Create a couple of offer/message options

3)      Run a test (maybe) on a sample of customers

4)      Incorporate event-based context (because it just seems to makes sense)

5)      Take the best (average) performer

6)      Send the offer out to everyone

Today’s mobile marketers focus on average response rates much like Gary Fusion focused on a player’s batting average instead of a player’s on base percentage (OBP).    They focus on “hitting for the fences” rather than on getting singles and doubles.  Your goal shouldn’t be to send out as many messages as possible, figure out the best segmentation scheme or get the best average response rate;  it should be to align the right message and right time with the right customer.

The A’s Peter Brand, the Yale educated “little geek who could,” applied Saber metrics to shake conventional baseball wisdom.   Analytic driven contextual marketing is doing the same thing for mobile marketing but it requires some new thinking and a shift from what’s ‘comfortable.’  Brand’s new way of scouting created some uncomfortable moments in the A’s organization.  So, too, mobile marketers will go through some rough patches as they figure out this new way of marketing that relies more on data, analysis and constant feedback rather than gut and A/B tests.

Success takes patience.  If you left the movie half way through, you would have seen the A’s in last place at the All-star breakand a coach (Art Howe) doing everything to preserve the past to the point of killing the current season to protect it.

“I want Dye in right, Justice DHing, Peña on the bench, Hatteberg at first, and anyone but Mags first out of the pen.” (Billy Beane)

“You want Peña on the bench?”  (Art Howe)

“That's right. So you can play Hatty.” (Billy Beane)

“Peña is not only the best first baseman on the roster, he's the only first baseman on the roster.” (Art Howe)

“Listen to me, Hatty gets on base more than Peña. In fact, twenty percent more.”  (Billy Beane)

“And his fielding?” (Art Howe)

“His fielding does not matter.” (Billy Beane)

“I've heard enough of this.” (Art Howe)

“Have you?” (Billy Beane)

“And I, uh... I disagree with you, plain and simple. And moreover, I'm playing my team in a way that I can explain in job interviews next winter.” (Art Howe)

Success takes patience.  And it was after the All-star break that the A’s ran up a winning streak of 20 games on the way to winning the division.  It was hard and if the A’s hadn’t seen it all the way through, there would have been no streak, nor a re-engineering of how EVERY team thereafter changed to incorporate Saber metrics into their operations.

So if it’s hard, what will drive the change?   The Oakland A’s were forced to change when faced with a payroll that was one quarter the size of the Yankees.  They had to think different.   This line from Beane summed it up:

“The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there's fifty of crap, and then there's us. It's an unfair game. And now we've been gutted. We're like organ donors for the rich. Boston's taken our kidneys, Yankees have taken our heart. And you guys just sit around talking the same old "good body" nonsense like we're selling jeans. Like we're looking for Fabio. We've got to think differently. We are the last dog at the bowl.  You see what happens to the runt of the litter? He dies.” (Billy Beane)

With shrinking budgets, pressure to show incremental lift (over doing nothing at all), and challenges to grab a customer’s attention, management is looking to their marketers to fuel topline growth and are shaking things up when results aren’t clear.

Much like the Oakland A’s back in 2002, mobile marketers are being asked to do more with less.   The answer is in the data.  They just have to have the patience to watch the whole movie through to the end.  Moneyball may not win an Oscar but the plot and performances clearly warrant a follow up sequel in the mobile playfield.

Enter the complex world of tracking mobile advertising. Tracking online advertising including unique exposure to ads can be accomplished using cookies. However, there are countless mobile devices and browsers (along with different carriers), which may not support cookies, enable cookies, or persistently keep cookies. This poses a major challenge to the industry on accurate measurement, in particular on anonymously identifying unique devices.  Therefore, following a device through to a post-view behavior or identifying ad exposures that occurred among a survey sample is hard for marketers and their partners to do.

There are a number of mobile companies that claim to have their own unique id or "mobile cookie" technology.  Some of these companies use standard mobile browser cookies, HTML5 technology, data from http headers, mobile operator data, or a combination of these pieces of information to create a unique id for each device. Other companies may be able to use actual device ids which they turn into hashed or encrypted ids for use with partners. The ways in which these techniques are used vary, the accuracy of these techniques vary,  and privacy policies and opt-out solutions also may vary.  The point here is that there is not yet any consistency or standardization in mobile ad tracking.

Similarly on the the mobile ad serving front, a lot of  fragmentation also still exists. Third party ad serving is not prevalent and many mobile publishers use any number of (or even multiple) ad servers from DFP to AdMarvel to Ringleader Digital to proprietary solutions. This adds to the complexity of tracking things consistently and many of these ad servers aren't yet uniquely tracking ad exposures.

One thing that the industry needs to be very vigilant about in this process is privacy. A recent study by TRUSTe found that nearly three-quarters of US smartphone owners indicated that they did not like to be tracked by advertisers on their mobile phones. Phones are a very personal device so extra caution needs to be taken in how data is collected and used.  We need to educate consumers about tracking and be as transparent as possible with them to get this right.

In my opinion, the mobile industry and all parties in the ecosystem (advertisers, agencies, publishers, technology, and measurement companies) need to work together to decide on or develop the right tracking and ad serving solutions and standardize these practices to move us all forward. We also need to put the right privacy policies and education in place and be very open and transparent about our practices. I challenge us all to be willing to work closely together on this and make the investments necessary to get the technology and privacy right.

Tracking mobile visitors with typical JavaScript based analytics is not an easy task for several reasons, and often involves a unique configuration.  I’m going to share one of my secrets for doing so with Google Analytics.  This method, which utilizes regular expressions, can be leveraged in any analytics solution that allows for custom filters.

The first problem with mobile analytics is that not all smart phones execute JavaScript (required by most web based analytics such as Google Analytics).  While this problem is slowly going away as older phones are replaced by newer phones (phones that are about 2 years old or older might not execute JS, whereas new phones will), this must be taken into consideration when looking at absolute numbers of mobile visitors. 

There are several ways to track mobile users with web analytics.  The main analytics companies offer “default” tracking methods, such as simply identifying users by screen resolutions or browsers and operating systems.

However, these “out-of-the-box” methods involve some guesswork and leaps of faith.  We found an easy way to deal with the problem (in Google Analytics) is to create a “mobile” profile.

We then create a custom filter as shown in the screenshot.  The expression you see in the image (pasted as text below) filters out resolution by the height and width of the screen resolutions.  

Top content – see which pages mobile users access.  If you have a very large site, or a site in many languages, this is particularly useful before you build your mobile site.  Mobile users may be interested in a small subset of your site – knowing this can save you a fortune building out your mobile site.