Bango Analytics – is that it?
I have seen lots of hype on Bango Analytics and I finally found the time to set it up and test it. I got my starter pack and am going to set it up on my Gomonews.mobi site.
Then I took a look around the Bango site and services. I saw the Mobile Search Optimisation button and thought – looks interesting.
I was disappointed as it was just a mobile site push service to search engines. OK, disappointed is the wrong word as this does show that Bango is jumping on the bandwagon of SEO in Internet style fashion. But is this it for syndicated mobile search engine optimisation.
So I used a couple of the services –but didn’t get any confirmation of success of the site submission and felt a bit confused. In fact, I thought is that it?
I can do all of this already on mobile with my mobile advertising company or the site creator that I use. But first, am about to set up the Bango starter code and let’s check the results first.
But I am slightly confused why a payment company is doing this? I feel a briefing with Bango coming on.
But I did sign up for I Love Mobile Web.
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6 Responses to “Bango Analytics – is that it?”
Bena,
Welcome to the club. See this thread on my Mobile Analytics Blog entitled “Bango, please stop calling it Mobile Web Analytics!”
http://www.mobilewebanalytics.net/?p=16
The comments from the folks at Bango are particularly interesting. If you’d like to try Mobilytics, please let me know. We are adding some more beta testers next week. I’d love your feedback. I have tried to compare the two products, but found no way to easily install Bango on complete site.
Greg Harris, CEO
Mobile Visions, Inc
http://www.mobilytics.net
Comment made on May 15th, 2008 at 11:51 amHi Bena,
Firstly, glad to have you signed up to Bango Analytics.
The reason a payment company like Bango is doing analytics is quite simple. Our customers demanded accurate independent data to help them make the best decisions about which advertising and search marketing campaigns were working best for them. Sure they could get data from the ad companies they were using, but they wanted a trusted, impartial view. Bango was already providing accurate visitor identification for consumers making payments, all achieved through our unique user ID technology. So using this ID to provid visitor information for people clicking on ads and navigating to a destination URL was an obvious and easy step – the technology was already proven. To that end our initial release of Bango Analytics focuses on campaign analysis using Bango tracking links and features like our goal comparison reports make this task simple.
Our next step is to make it easier to understand what happens to visitors between campaigns and goals – true site analysis. Keep your eye on our website (http://www.bango.com) as we have some interesting developments planned for the next few months. This new release will not only make it easier to use Bango and quicker to read the results, but crucially it will maintain our reputation for accuracy and continue to give precise tracking of individual visitors across multiple sessions. You can use this data to improve your site or extract it via comprehensive APIs to dynamically customize pages depending on whether the visitor is new or your most loyal customer.
All of this is only possible because of Bango’s history and well established technology.
I’m always happy to chat so feel free to contact me if you want some more guidance and background.
Andy Bovingdon
Comment made on May 16th, 2008 at 12:37 amVP Product Marketing, Bango.
Greg would love to test the BETA. Andy thanks for your comments.
I don’t want guidance or background as I have a strong history (15 years) in mobile and have spoken with Bango regularly. More recently the CEO Ray was on the panel I moderated at MEM08.
But I am confused at Bango’s direction at the moment. I fear Bango is looking at the hype in the mobile market and trying to evangelise itself from it.
Hence the submit to mobile directory service (which doesn’t even offer confirmation). It looks good, but does it work? There is no proof and with no confirmation results or “thanks for submitting” its a bit of joke.
How can I run and manage a mobile seo campaign or a PPC campaign for our clients and submit with Bango knowing that my search engine submissions had gone though?
On top of that - adding analtyics to the site is easier said than done. Third party stats do not detect (mobile click fraud) or auto-generated clicks either.
Comment made on May 16th, 2008 at 12:55 amBango’s direction is the same as it has always been - to make our customers successful on the mobile web and to generally build the mobile market.
For some time now our focus has been on three key areas.
1. Traffic - anyone doing business on the mobile web, whether sales or marketing driven, needs people visiting their site. More people visiting increases the opportunity to collect payments. To that end Bango provides tools to help our customers easily undertake text marketing campaigns (txt trigger), desktop to mobile promotion (web trigger), advertising with guidance on our ad marketplace and search with feeds to small but an increasing number of search providers.
2. Information - the more you know about the visitors to your site, the better you can engage in long term relationships, evolve your site and strategy and earn money. We have provided analytics capabilities and a range of personalization APIs as part of our payment product for many years. We made our first step into a separate Analytics product with Bango Vision 18 months ago which was re-named and re-launched as the more obvious Bango Analytics three months ago.
3. Payment - some customers optionally wish to collect money from their visitors. By linking payment with traffic and information, Bango has successfully provided the best transaction success rates in the industry. Combined with our BillRank technology our system always dynamically delivers the best billing method for each given transaction.
Traffic, Information and Payment (TIP) has been our mantra for a few years now. The latest developments simply address the fact that many customers are delivering ad-funded or other non-payment focused sites; Bango Analytics simply addresses that demand with a better name than Bango Vision.
As for your experience with our search submission response, I have passed your feedback to our dev team. I agree we could do a better job with that.
You are correct that adding analytics to a site is non trivial, especially when the majority of mobile browsers do not support JavaScript, cookies or referral information particularly well. This can result in results being falsely skewed towards more advanced handsets that behave more like PCs. Fortunately the Bango User ID technology is more accurate at identifying actual individuals (it has to be to support secure one-click payments) – so detecting such tricks as auto generated clicks becomes much easier for us.
Comment made on May 16th, 2008 at 1:40 amHi Bena. Good to hear from you again.
I hope Andy’s summary is clear. Bango has been working hard to make the mobile web easy since our start-up in 1999. We started with access & traffic - which proved a hard sell in 2000, so we added payment in 2001 - and that took off - making us the world’s #1 in mobile web payments - and making us well known in that area. Analytics is really important: The average facebook or myspace person who sets up a Bango Button to point at a photo is really curious to find out how many people downloaded their image and where they are coming from!
On the search submission, you are right that not having feedback is infuriating. Our “excuse” is that the data you give us passes through many routes to get to the search companies: sitemaps, RSS feeds, even batch submitted spreadsheets. We get no feedback from these channels, but perhaps we could say we posted the info - even if we don’t know fully how the search company uses it. You make a good point.
Ray
Comment made on May 16th, 2008 at 4:18 amHi Ray,
Comment made on May 16th, 2008 at 6:42 amI look forward to talking with you or Andy on Monday. I didn’t know that Bango started with traffic. So you see analytics on falling back on what you started with? But lets go over questions like these on Monday. On Sunday -I am going to setup Bango make a Bango wap sit and also add a payment feature for my analytics - so I will make sure I am prepared!
Bena
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