By Brennan Hayden

There is an elephant in the room when it comes to mobile content sales. It gives pause to every content publisher from EA to Warner Music.

The issue stifles sales, promotion expenditures and profitability, all up and down the value chain, including for the carriers.

This same issue discourages smart-money investment in mobile content.

Addressing this issue would very likely breathe new life into content sales, even dramatically so, by bringing in new buyers and increasing the purchasing frequency of existing buyers.

What is the name of this elephant? Get your mind out of the gutter! It is not adult content, that is for sure. It is three words.

No conversion tracking 
That is right.

When it comes to on-deck content sales, wireless carriers do not provide usable, timely feedback for tuning a performance ad campaign when the conversion is defined as the on-deck purchase of content.

Any ad campaign you run to drive sales of your on-deck mobile content must be done in the blind, with day-old data at best, even then aggregating undifferentiated organic and ad-generated sales data in bulk.

Want to know which click led to which sale? Forget it.

Want to know for certain how many sales in total resulted from your ad campaign? Dream on. Or wait a month.

Wait a minute, you say. What about all of the ad networks out there, many of them reporting amazing growth? Surely the advertisers would not spend money if they could not use modern performance-tuning methods?

Well, you are right, but the big money is being spent on campaigns where conversion occurs outside the carrier content deck, such as with coupons, giveaways, simple click-to-call campaigns or off-deck vending of paid content.

But if your business is selling mobile content on-deck, you can buy all the ads you want. You just cannot tell if they work.

Did my female targeted ads convert better than the male ones? Did the home page convert better than the sports page? No way to tell.

OK, of course, there are convoluted, human-resource-intensive, time-consuming, expensive ways to test what might sort of look like it converts better at some point in time. But forget about using analytics.

You will not know if you fished the waters bare until the numbers have long declined. Then you have to go looking for good inventory the hard way again.

End result: stop-start campaign
Now, let me tell you I am praying that I am wrong.

I am hoping that there is some secret handshake of which I am somehow unaware that will allow someone to flip a switch at the carrier that causes the publisher to get a real-time data record when a sale happens, with an affiliate ID, source code or signature passed all the way through to identify the click-path taken by the purchaser.

But I am quite certain the best anyone can do is as follows: the over-worked content buyer at the carrier can manually reach into some arcane system once a week or so, or more likely once per month, probably without official authorization strictly speaking, and run a report and send it to you in email. If you ask. Nicely. Ten times. Each week.

The result is that it is difficult to justify ad spends for new products, since there is no baseline with which to establish a statistical method to measure sales to get a campaign proof point. And new products are the ones that need effective advertising the most.

The saddest thing is that the next generation of carrier content vending technology is also missing the boat.

Major upgrades leave conversion tracking out
Here is the bottom line. It is a little complicated, but follow me here please.

First, the future of mobile content sales is firmly tied to the ability of publishers to drive demand for their products through sophisticated advertising and promotion techniques developed for online over the last 15 years.

The days of growing your mobile content business through lobbying the carriers for placement are gone forever.

Next, the carriers do not appear committed to fully enabling modern performance marketing techniques with their existing or even next-generation content vending machines and advertising network APIs.

Finally, so, then, hence, thus and therefore ? how committed are the carriers to continuing to vend paid third-party mobile content?

I would say at the highest levels, where online performance marketing is well understood: not very.

What we all hear on the street is that direct billing might be getting some serious attention for moving the industry forward. That would be welcome.

But vending? Of third-party content? Without the proof points that free up the big advertising dollars, I have to believe all content sellers will do everything in their power to move sales off-deck.

And it will not be because of bad revenue-share or restrictive walled gardens or any of those old-school complaints.

It will simply be due to lack of a clear-line to growth on-deck, due primarily to lack of a modern online direct marketing infrastructure, preventing publishers from being able to directly grow their on-deck businesses themselves.

It is a shame really.

I know more than a dozen publishers who would spend $10,000 per day on advertising on-deck and off-deck, if they could get real-time conversion data that allowed performance tuning. They would even take next-day conversion data, if it was tracked from click to sale.

Now don?t get me wrong ? the situation is not hopeless.

We have proof points that work effectively. I suppose everyone in this business develops something that gets them by.

But it is so much harder than it needs to be, and slows everything way down. You have to watch everything 24 hours a day.

It gets a little personal, because even with the good fortune of sophisticated software to help, I literally get less sleep ? and we all make less money ? than if we had direct conversion tracking for on-deck sales.

Brennan Hayden is vice president of WDA, East Lansing, MI. Reach him at .