NeoMedia Technologies, Inc (NEOM)

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The Dynamics of Mobile Measurement & Metrics

http://mobilenextbigthing.biz/2010/09/21/the-dynamics-of-mobile-measurement-metrics/

There are many different ways to measure the impact of marketing campaigns – Cost-per-Click (CPC), Cost Per Thousand impressions (CPM), Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI), Cost-per-Action/Acquisition (CPA), etc. At end of the day, these metrics provide marketers with important information on how to get the best return on their investment.

In the early days of Internet advertising there were a few big players like Advertising.com, ValueClick, and DoubleClick all trying to assemble the largest online ad network. Now that mobile is such a crucial component, companies like Google/AdMob, Millennial Media and AOL/Third Screen have jumped into the mobile game. The reason these ad networks provide a great benefit to marketers is that they offer large inventory volume that gives marketers the assurance they can reach the volume and mix of audience they need in the budgeted time they plan.

In a totally different way, Twitter, Facebook Places Applications, Foursquare Business Check in Specials, and the myriad of social networking options out there offer brands and enterprises ways to reach aggregated consumers in volume by leveraging new social networking web tools.

The good news is that mostly all of these new mobile marketing solutions offer the same media buying options in terms of CPMs, CPCs, CPAs, and the ability to quantify individual program ROIs quickly. But at the same time, these new mobile marketing methods require the “brand manager” or “agency account manager” to learn the increasingly complex world of mobile and that all “clicks” or metrics are not the same. The mobile ecosystem is currently much more fragmented than the wired Internet, making it harder to aggregate and compare analytical data.

A marketer may outsource their Internet ad network buys to one media buyer, their mobile campaigns to a mobile provider, and their general brand campaigns to a brand agency, or conduct lots of pilots in mobile with even more vendors.

For example, let’s say you use Google/AdMob on the mobile side and that accounts for 60% of your budget. You use AOL/Third Screen, Millennial Media, and iAd for iTunes for the remaining 40%. This means you’ve got four different ad network vendors – and that’s just mobile display advertising, let alone what you are doing on mobile search, Internet search, social media and more.

So how do you measure all of these different campaigns? Do you just look at the biggest one and make that one your gauge? Or, maybe you have a campaign management tool that looks at all of the different sources and tells you how many leads came in across these different sources and aggregates your combined ROI.

In the mobile barcodes world, Neustar is enabling interoperability among mobile ecosystem players and can work with campaign manager partners to enable them to track performance of their campaigns and compare them to industry standards.

A barcode measurement network will be important in demonstrating the effectiveness of mobile barcodes for retailers and manufacturers. This also gives mobile marketers the opportunity to budget effectively and monitor the effectiveness of their campaigns.

One huge advantage of mobile barcodes is that they allow you to get an Internet-type of measurement – such as CPC — off of print advertising mediums like in-store signage or a coupon placed on a windshield. Since these channels are not connected to the Internet, these types of interactive metrics were previously impossible. Now you can compare apples to apples with a true, measurable response rate on all of your media.

We are just scratching the surface of what has the potential to be a big shift in the measurement of mobile campaigns. As a neutral third party, Neustar can ensure the interoperability that is needed to help campaign managers run more effective and more measurable campaigns.