Mobile Analytics and Multi-channel Measurement

June Dershewitz asked me months ago to write this article but because of my book I never had the time. Now that it’s finished and with the publishers I can get back to normal.

The case was really interesting because the the client, a mobile telecommunications operator based in Indonesia wanted to create buzz about their brand new service offering and kick off the usage of MMS services. The more MMS services used means more revenue for the company as every MMS message is charged to the consumers phone bill.

A competition was launched where consumers would have to use their phone to go to a mobile website, complete a number of tasks (including sending a number of MMS messages). Points were awarded on the mobile website for every task completed, the point being to try to amass more points than anyone else. The competitions top 50 would win a lot of free phone credit while the top 10 won cool new phones and the top 3 won top of the range motorcycles.

Our challenge was to measure the success of this campaign. We ran a KPI workshop and defined the KPIs. The main business success measured would be MMS campaign value and then MMS usage lift in the active users.

In the KPI workshop we broke the campaign up into a REAN (Reach, engage, activate and nurture) map.

If you click on the image you’ll see the different elements in each dimension.

This allowed us to plan how to measure the campaign successfully. The idea was to channel people from online campaigns and offline events to a mobile website or to a normal website where they could find out more information about the competition. The website listed in the engage part of the model was a campaign website designed to persuade people to go to the mobile website and take part in the competition using their phone.

We knew it would be extremely difficult to measure the success of the campaign without identifying the competition participants. Therefore when we finally got the participants to the mobile website they would have to sign up with their phone number to receive instructions on how to proceed (via text message – tracked by the Telco). In this way we could also track exactly which tasks (conversions in the activation part of the REAN model) each participant had completed and could award the points accordingly.

There were also challenges with some of the offline event locations. How did we know for instance that people attending the Telco’s live event launch had signed up from the event after hearing about the competition there or had they signed up after seeing it online? We solved this by giving each event screen a different ‘activation code’ meaning we knew which screen and which location the mobile site sign up came from.

The tasks and users were logged in the mobile websites content management system. With this campaign therefore we had a number of different data sources to measure the effect of the campaign.

• We had SMS sent/clicked from the telco (so we had a success ratio immediately).
• We had Mobile CMS log file data
• We had event screen data (logged in the mobile CMS)
• We had website data (Google Analytics)
• We had MMS traffic logs (from the telco) going back one year and showing traffic peaks during the campaign period

The results were a considerable lift in the number of MMS messages sent, many active participants and tens of thousands of tasks were completed (coming form the CMS logs). The campaign also contributed to an overall lift in MMS usage (seen in the Telco’s bandwidth traffic logs), we had a vast amount of website visitors which was a goal for the branding and a good sign up ratio. The client was very happy about the results and have since run similar campaigns.

We learned a lot from these campaigns and were able to pass the learning from this campaign to the next one for the client. One finding for instance was making the SMS sign up process very simple as people abandoned in large amounts when they had to react to more than one SMS message to activate their participation in the competition. We also saw that by not teasing the Telco’s website quickly enough we lost a lot of free traffic we could’ve taken advantage of.

Because this campaign was a mobile campaign and the measurement was multi-channel we had a number of different challenges. However what was key to successfully measuring the campaign was a KPI workshop, effective use of the REAN mapping and good coordination of the event both on the ground and online.

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About Cap'n Blackbeak

Steve is a well known analytics specialist, author and speaker. A pioneer since 2002, he established one of the first European web analytics consultancies (Aboavista), later acquired by Satama (now Trainers’ House) in 2006. In 2008 he wrote his first book Cult Of Analytics published on May 14th 2009. He currently serves as CEO at Quru and has presented and keynoted web analytics topics across Europe. These include The Internet Marketing Conference (Stockholm), The Search Engine strategies (Stockholm), IIH (Copenhagen), the IAB Finland (Helsinki), Media Plaza (Amsterdam), Design For Conversion (Amsterdam) The eMetrics Summit (London, Munich, Stockholm), Divia (Helsinki) in addition to sitting on dozens of panels.