Mobile Analytics: Chat with Greg Harris CEO Mobilytics

Now, I was quite nervous talking to Greg Harris (CEO Mobilytics) yesterday, as he is also a blogger and “we bloggers” can be quite difficult sometimes.

But to my surprise we had a lovely conversation and Greg (a man with many hats) has a very well spoken clear voice which sounds a bit like a school teacher. Anyway – I got the overview on Mobilytics and coming from the mobile search space – his take on tracking search engine results – did excite me.

 Bena: Greg, let’s go straight into the interview I have a few questions prepared for you.  But first give me the 30 second pitch on Mobilytics

Greg: OK sure. The key point about Mobilytics is that it is hosted.

Bena: Hosted?

Greg: Yes. It doesn’t use the standard image tag for tracking purposes. We do campaign tracking and mobile specific tracking purely for mobile devices.

Bena: So what kind of tracking does this provide?

Greg: You get the best analytics for mobile – visitors, page version, page hits, campaign tracking.

Bena: Greg, so does this mean you track specific data only?

Greg:We pull all data. The entire data from the webserver into a log. We have a server based tag – very similar to the mobile ad networks. So the data is expandable and instant. This means that some hits only get huge hits on certain days and we are able to continue to effectively track and monitor the site and data.

Bena: Greg. I am going to sound stupid – I am sorry. But is this then an ad tag and you can only track where the ad tag is?

Greg:Bena. We have employed a server tag. So the referrer is sent to a site that links to my site so we can track not only users but also links and where the user came from or goes to.

Competitors will only show you who has visited but we can show you everything – even if they came in from a search engine.

Bena:OMG. So basically – you are saying that you have made for mobile solution. You use an ad server tag similar to what AdMob has and you can track users not just hits. You have a richer service because you also track from search keywords and links.

Greg: Yes.

Bena: What is the business model?

Greg: Advertising is one business model for the future but at the moment we have a monthly cost.

Bena: So a fixed amount for analytics?

Greg: Well we work on the advertising model so its cost per thousand based on the number of page views. We can charge between 4-12 cents per thousand based on page views.

There is a 49 dollar version a free version a more expensive version there are several options.  We also have a private or white label solution for companies to use our services.

Bena: So is there huge demand?

Greg: There is a lot of demand. We were one of the first to start development and we are a small growing company and we have taken our time to focus on the right product and service. When we first announced our services in BETA we got huge interest because of the very very poor existing solutions.  Number of visitors or hits only is not enough to track sites.

Bena: Super, I think I have what I need – but, wait. What about the Mobile SEO services you mentioned on the blog?

Greg: Yes we are adding search engine ranking and positioning reporting.  (Greg went into more detail but I will follow up on this on Mobile SEO News blog – it sounded very interesting).

Bena: I invited Greg to join the metaTXT working group and we said thank-you!