Mobile Web technology firm Bango launched an analytics service to help mobile marketers understand how people interact with WAP sites and which marketing campaigns are most effective.

The Bango Analytics service tells mobile site owners who their visitors are, where they come from and what they do.

"It's quite simple to deliver mobile services," said Anil Malhotra, founder and senior vice president of alliances and marketing at Bango, Cambridge, England. "Online marketing dollars are starting to be moved to mobile. Mobile is driven by the fact that there is a well-developed mobile presence and companies now see the importance of delivering information to mobile phones.

"Larger companies are also moving into this space and giving ad opportunities for mobile," he said. "Once we saw that, we knew mobile needs a better, more innovative way to provide accurate conversion tracking for ads."

Bango Analytics operates as a hosted service, allowing mobile site owners anywhere in the world to connect their sites to the service in minutes.

Bango profiles users browsing the mobile Web across hundreds of networks worldwide. Using identification technology, Bango Analytics records and presents data on the overall patterns of traffic visiting a mobile site, down to the behavior of individual users.

"It's not enough simply to measure how many visits you get to your mobile site -- you need a deeper understanding of what those visitors are doing," said Ray Anderson, founder/CEO of Bango.

"Bango Analytics adds greater insight and clarity not available until now, providing an independent statement of mobile Web site activity and campaign value across different marketing channels," he said.

BadWords?
Put simply, Bango tells marketers how many unique visitors came to their mobile site, on what type of phone and the type of content the user was seeking. It also tells marketers what networks in which countries visitors use and what content they liked most.

Bango Analytics is available for free for up to 10,000 page hits per month to enable anyone to see who is interacting with the site and from where. After that there is a monthly charge depending on activity levels.

"Our research has shown that Google AdWords conversion tracking on mobile is flawed and gives advertisers inaccurate results for any mobile AdWords campaign," claims Farhad Divecha, managing director of AccuraCast, a London-based search marketing agency.

This gap served as an opportunity for Bango to step in.

"We can tell you who hits your site, irrespective of the network," Mr. Malhotra said. "We are drilling down the carrier, country, the phone they have."

Market researcher Gartner Inc. projects $11 billion in global revenue from mobile advertising by 2011, up from less than $1 billion in 2007.

There is a widely held view within advertising agencies that the lack of independent mobile analytics is holding back mobile marketing initiatives, according to Mr. Malhotra.

"Google approaches the problem by simply porting a wired solution onto a whole new platform, whereas Bango uses the personalization and localization offered by a mobile device to provide a richer advertiser experience," he claims.