SAN FRANCISCO - A lack of consistency among mobile marketing metrics is slimming down the growth of the industry from the current experimental phase to mass consumption.

Executives at CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment's panel "Mobile Marketing and Advertising Metrics: Establishing Meaningful Benchmarks and KPIs" discussed the importance of establishing key performance indicators to overcome a lack of trust among advertisers in the mobile channel.

"A successful metrics for mobile marketing campaigns would include unique visits, conversion rates, handset types, screen sizes, etc.," said Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango. "Most people I've talked to can't even measure unique users yet."

The consensus the panel reached was that the mobile advertising market on the whole has not kept pace with the rapid growth of mobile media consumption, and that improved metrics and measurability would jumpstart the rapid growth of the industry.

"Availability of metrics and consistency of data intelligence are vital to provide comfort to advertisers, especially these days when budgets are tight," said Michael Collins, CEO of Kinetic Mobile.

Lack of awareness of the audience size and the complexity of the mobile marketing ecosystem are other reasons for the slower-than-expected growth of the industry.

"We need to have a simple solution, so that we know what the audience for SMS is in the U.S., what it is in Japan, etc.," said Jesse Goranson, senior vice president of Nielsen Mobile. "Brands want to measure their ROI, which is tough but can be done with things like pop-up surveys.

"Brands want to know how mobile campaigns integrate with their other activities and they want evidence that mobile marketing works," he said.

It's clear that the potential is huge, but mobile campaigns must be more accountable for brands' investment in mobile to equal or surpass their investment in traditional channels.

The key to that may be the information carriers compile for each of their subscribers.

"The metrics clients are asking for are unique visitors, the targeted reach unique visitors and their demographics, stickiness, duration and frequency," said Will Hodgman, president of ComScore/M:Metrics. "We have to encourage, solicit and corral carriers to make their mobile Web data available."

Despite addressing these challenges, there was palpable optimism that mobile marketing as an industry is approaching a tipping point.

"Mobile is a mass medium and a personal medium," Mr Hodgman said. "We're seeing 85 percent penetration of mobile worldwide, and it crosses every demographic group that you can possibly have.

"The mobile Internet is bigger than Oprah and 4.5 million people watch her every day," he said.