Holy grail of mobile web found
Bango says it can count cell surfers accurately
A COMPANY BEST known for its mobile payments service, Bango, claims to have found the Holy Grail of the mobile internet: a means of counting unique visitors to mobile web sites.
This capability is built into its Bango Analytics version 3.0 product.
Capturing unique visitors hits is more tricky with mobile web surfers than their PC equivalents. For starters, cookies aren’t generally supported by mobile phone browsers or can be lost as soon as the phone is switched off.
Plus the IP address of a mobile handset usually belongs to the network operator rather than an individual device.
Bango carried out a survey of over 550 mobile website owners, and found that 80 per cent wanted to know the dail, weekly or monthly number of unique visitors to their sites.
Data is based around Bango's user ID technology which is created when an individual clicks on an advert or browses a mobile site.
The ID is compiled through sophisticated WAP gateway profiling, data from browser analysis, session information plus network interactions.
The good news is that for smaller sites the service is absolutely free and the price rises to a maximum of £299 ($499) for a site which has five million page views per month.
Those who reckon their mobile site attracts less than 100,000 page visits per month can try it out for free here. µ
Comments
mumbo jumbo :O)
another non event load of carp, WTF is a 'unique visitor' !!! more stuff to slow pages loading, these pseudo analysts are extracting huge ammounts of hard earned 'beer tokens' out of the gullible unwashed *cough, webmaster masses, not to mention taking the urine by the bucket load, pseudo quackery !! :O)
Site owners, just have an easy to use feedback
that doesn't require logging in so visitors can say what they like and dislike about your site. Read their comments and act upon them, so long as your existing customers are happy with the changes. So maybe have 2 versions running, old and new, to give people time to change over.When AMD bought ATI they made the download link a few steps longer, which is not so bad. When Seagate bought Maxtor, Seagate destroyed the useful and easy to navigate Maxtor site and the links to the Maxtor tools. Seagate also made support worse.
Seagate are idiots if they don't know how to look after existing customers. Seagate stopped the "advanced replacement" that Maxtor had for broken hard drives where Maxtor would immediately ship a replacement hard drive as soon as you reported a fault code.
You could request an RMA for a faulty hard drive, provide a credit card number and Maxtor would post you a replacement while you still had the defective hard drive. This meant you weren't waiting around to remove the hard drive, find some packaging, go to the post office (or wait for courier collection), then wait for RMA Dept to accept the delivery and ok the posting out of a replacement drive. This takes about 1 week, which for a small business or single user can be annoying.
Maxtor would give you 30 days to send in the broken drive, if they received if within that time then they wouldn't charge the credit card.
Since Seagate have taken over Maxtor and messed up customer service I no longer buy Maxtor or Seagate products.
Sh*te
"For starters, cookies aren’t generally supported by mobile phone browsers or can be lost as soon as the phone is switched off.Plus the IP address of a mobile handset usually belongs to the network operator rather than an individual device."
Arbitrary cookies can be force to session cookies by most PC browsers. Any network manager with any sense of paranoia at will have set the user's browsers to do this (corporate/academic I admit, but enough to poison the statistical space). Therefore cookie lifetime data is very questionable regardless of whether the client is a phone or a PC.
IP address on every service provider I've ever heard of is assigned using DHCP, and can (will) change over time and therefore belongs to the network operator rather than an individual device. Again that the client device is a phone or PC is irrelevant.
Mr. Editor: send your reporters to sysadmin boot camp for while! Emphasis on the boot, IMHO.