Tools for analyzing PC browsing behavior are ubiquitous, but specialists are emerging in the mobile analytics niche.
One such company is Bango, which formed in 1999 as a mobile payments system. In time, Bango and its customers saw the need to accurately identify the end users, and traditional analytics products just didn’t work on cell phones.
Technologies like Javascript, cookies, the need for browsers to pass referrer data, IP addresses shared among many users, the question of which carrier is in use – those are important reasons to use a specialty tool, said CEO and Founder Ray Anderson, from Cambridge, U.K.
Bango Analytics works when companies set up their Websites to link back to Bango’s servers, and then Bango’s servers route the user to the original content. In future versions, Bango will add the ability to track data such as users’ favorite sites, but they’ll try to be mindful of privacy, Anderson said. Analyzing mobile search data is also on the horizon.
“I’ve been pretty pleased by the information we’ve been getting,” said Bob Kasher, a sales director and product manager at MPS Mobile in Portland, Ore. MPS offers a content-delivery network, began testing the Bango Analytics product in September 2007 and has since purchased it. Traffic analysis showed that MPS has many users in South Africa, he said.
“Ultimately what would be very nice, further on down the line, is whether or not they can take the analytics and begin to supply some kind of data on advertising,” he added.