2008-07-22 11:52:32 - Bango today unveiled new technology designed to help website owners measure the value of mobile sites by accurately counting unique visitors browsing their site. This new site analysis capability in the latest release of Bango Analytics, v3.0, complements existing campaign analysis functionality and features enhanced image tag technology to identify unique users.

'No one but Bango has a mobile analytics service that provides an accurate unique visitor count,' said Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango. 'With this new version, we provide both site and campaign analysis in one product - a first for the industry. Mobile website owners can now get a real picture of the value of their mobile website.'

Results of a

recent survey of more than 550 mobile website owners, commissioned by Bango, showed that the 'most important' data point for them is unique visitor count. Respondents gave the following answers to the question: 'Which of the following mobile web metrics are important to you?'

* The daily/weekly/monthly number of unique visitors to your mobile website - 80%
* Conversion rates/effectiveness of mobile marketing - 71%
* New/repeat visitors - 58%
* Information about the handsets your visitors use - 54%
* Location - 50%
* The mobile networks used by visitors to your mobile website - 41%

To provide the highest levels of accuracy, Bango provides two different techniques for capturing mobile metrics - link tracking for campaign analysis and page tracking for site analysis. More at blog.bango.com/2008/07/09/tracking-sites-and-campaigns/

The new site analysis feature is easy to implement - one line of html code is placed in each page to be tracked without the need to install anything on the server. A site summary report provides a high level view on the key metrics for a mobile website, including unique visitor numbers so it's easy to see how the mobile site is performing.

Bango Analytics operates as a hosted service, allowing mobile website owners anywhere in the world to connect their sites to the Analytics service in minutes and start getting results free of charge for up to 100,000 page visits per month. Try it at www.bango.com/analytics.

How it's done
Capturing an accurate picture of the number of unique visitors is more complex on mobile than on the PC web. Cookies aren't reliable on mobile phones and IP addresses belong to the network operator rather than the end user.

For each individual that clicks on an ad or browses a site, a privacy protected Bango User ID is created, compiled through sophisticated WAP gateway profiling, data from browser analysis, session information and network interactions. This unique user ID enables Bango to distinguish between new and repeat users and therefore quantify precisely the number of unique visitors.