Mobile Analytics, Simplified.

PercentMobile Maps - 2nd Quarter 2010

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:25:00 -0400

Welcome to our first round of PercentMobile Maps. Our goal is to introduce you to the wonderfully diverse global mobile ecosystem. All maps are based on second quarter 2010 visits to sites that are tracked with our mobile analytics system.

Nokia Devices Web Usage

Lets start with the CEO searching and share dropping Finnish giant. Once globally perceived as the mobile industry leader, Nokia is now struggling with its quickly aging operating systems and number pad phones. While it currently has a stronghold in the largest and most populous countries, most of those phones are quite old and many will soon need to be replaced. The large majority are inexpensive phones with less profit margin and no attractive digital media store.

View map at larger size.

Apple Devices Web Usage

A phenomenon, Apple rose from nothing in the summer of 2007 to a mobile superpower with amazing interface concepts, fantastic web experience, attractive applications and its iTunes digital media store. It speaks to their success that nearly everyone is trying to copy them.

View map at larger size.

BlackBerry Devices Web Usage

It used to be that the most recognizable feature of a businessman or politician was their suit. Now it is the symbiotic relationship with their BlackBerry device. Joining their ranks are teenagers who pump out text messages quickly thanks to BlackBerry’s built-in QWERTY keyboard, optimized for “thumbing.” An indication of BlackBerry’s success is that several companies such as Nexian, ZTE, Tianyu, Videocon and ti-phone are attempting to clone these iconic devices.

View map at larger size.

Samsung Devices Web Usage

The South Korean Conglomerate brand is found on everything from Chips, LCD Displays, Refrigerator, and Ships to the shirts of the English Premier League Team the Chelsea Football Club. Their mobile phones run Bada OS, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android and their own proprietary Operating System. It is perhaps the most diverse cell phone company, which is not surprising given its mothership nature.

View map at larger size.

WiFi Usage

Mobile phones with WiFi connectivity began to appear in 2006 with the Nokia N93. Now, most Smart and Experience Phones come equipped standard with WiFi. Their promise is faster speed and cost-free mobile browsing. Downsides include heavy battery usage, and not all user interfaces make it easy to select a WiFi network. The map below shows how actual users of WiFi-enabled mobile phones take advantage of the WiFi feature. Please note that we have excluded Non-Phones such as iPad, iPod, Sony PSP, etc. from this map.

View map at larger size.

Device Age

Last but not least, let’s have a look at the average release date of mobile devices used by country. Most countries in the Americas and Western Europe have newer devices, while most countries in Asia and the Middle East have slightly older devices, and many African countries have the oldest devices.

View map at larger size.

"But all these “big boys” [Google Analytics and WebTrends and others] have simply..."

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:32:00 -0400

“

But all these “big boys” [Google Analytics and WebTrends and others] have simply “added on” mobile analytics to their tools. The result is that they suffer from both a lack of imagination and, this is important, truly great databases when it comes to devices and carriers and other unique mobile information.

Not Percent Mobile.

They have two incredible benefits:

1. A really expansive and accurate database and detection mechanism when it comes to mobile platforms.

2. A really simple UI and reporting layer, even your mom will understand the data.

”

- Viral, Social, Sentiment, Mobile: 4 Cool Web Analytics Tools | Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

Avinash Kaushik, Author - Web Analytics 2.0 & Web Analytics: An Hour A Day | Analytics Evangelist - Google | Co-Founder - Market Motive Inc

Trendspotting with PercentMobile

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:51:40 -0400

Just as with the world at large, the mobile ecosystem is in constant motion. It grows and changes, sometimes significantly, sometimes subtly, every day. We want you to easily learn and understand those changes happening right now on your Site using Mobile Analytics by PercentMobile.

With this post the team is excited to introduce to you a new feature called ‘Trending’ which, after being used extensively internally, is now available for free on every Mobile Analytics Report for every user.

Using the feature ourselves has quickly and easily given us insight we couldn’t have gotten before on the mobile ecosystem at large. The results can be viewed in our recently published post “Second Quarter 2010 Mobile Ecosystem Highlights” where we gathered trending highlights on Operating Systems, Phone Types and WiFi Usage over the past 6 months.

For example, using the Trending feature we were able to observe a 95% increase in Android OS usage in the US (and a 94% increase in Europe respectively) across our network of tracked sites, which otherwise would not have been easily possible. Being able to perceive changes like this yields almost immediately a call to action in terms of consideration of the Android OS platform overall. We find this very exciting to know. It’s beautiful.

Click here or image above for full view.

With Trending you are now able to observe changes in most of your Reporting-dimensions.

To get you started, we would like to ask you:

Have WiFi-capable Devices been growing on your Site?
And what about iPads and other Non-Phone mobile devices? Can you find out if they’re becoming a growing audience of yours?
How are older Feature-Phones doing compared to highly interactive Experience-Phones?
Is traffic from iPhone OS Devices such as the iPhone, iPods and iPads growing or slowing?
Has your Site become more popular with owners of RIM OS Blackberry Devices?
Can you find a former unknown-to-you Network Operator climbing up hundred-fold within the last month?
Which country has dropped interest in your offering and which country is showing growing interest?
Have you noticed a drop or rise in WiFi usage and can you imagine why that is?

If you are already using PercentMobile, we highly recommend you sign in to your Reports right now and check out what insights your new Trending feature can offer you. If you are new to PercentMobile, get started to track your Sites by registering today.

We hope you will enjoy this new level of comprehension of your mobile ecosystem. Our objective always has been to make things simple and understandable so you can concentrate on what really matters to you.

With best wishes,

Your PercentMobile team.

11% of Web Traffic Worldwide is Now Mobile

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:43:00 -0400

Mobile traffic to sites designed for the desktop Web have increased over the last 6 months from 8.3% to 11%, a 32% increase.

Second Quarter 2010 Mobile Ecosystem Highlights

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:35:31 -0400

Second Quarter 2010 Mobile Ecosystem Highlights

PercentMobile Reports on the iPad now contain a nice map as...

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 16:33:00 -0400

PercentMobile Reports on the iPad now contain a nice map as well.

PercentMobile's Take On @drbarnard's, "Anti-Competitive AND Potentially Creepy"

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:00:00 -0400

“Oh, and there’s also AdMob’s incredibly flakey “Mobile Metrics” reports. They do such a hatchet job on those it must drive Apple nuts”

— Anti-Competitive AND Potentially Creepy - @drbarnard (via @rafer)

…and Cult of Mac on AdMob, “Don’t be surprised to see a report six months from now showing Apple’s mobile web traffic dropping by half or more. All of which suggests that a mobile ad network isn’t the best source for reporting the totality of mobile web traffic. Wouldn’t it be nice if all the mobile carriers got together and shared what they knew?”

PercentMobile’s Take

So who’s report on the OS war is closer to reality? AdMob showing their parent company Google winning with Android? Or, Apple’s sources of statistics that show a very different story.

As an independent mobile analytics provider we perceive the ecosystem differently. We ran a report on a sample of the mobile Web traffic that flows through PercentMobile’s network.

This is what we saw:

…and Blackberry (RIM) does better then anyone gives them credit for.

IAB Aims to Create Standards for Advertising on Tablets

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 22:38:00 -0400

rafer:

“The Interactive Advertising Bureau has launched a task force to recommend standards and best practices for display advertising on tablets and e-readers. An earlier effort by the IAB produced a set of specifications for display advertising on the Web that soon became industry standard. By bringing uniformity to display inventory, as well as creating standards for measurement, the IAB eased the way for publishers and marketers to buy and sell advertising.”

—

IAB Aims to Create Standards for Advertising on Tablets - ClickZ

Rafer sez:
With what we’ve learned over the intervening decade-plus, publishers shouldn’t adopt these advertiser and ad-network friendly standards. The value creation in standardized media is very uneven and publishers are the ones left holding the short end of the stick.

ReadWriteWeb Summit - The Real-Time Web - See You There

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 21:19:06 -0400

PercentMobile on, "Mobile OS web-browsing share" by @marcoarment

Sat, 22 May 2010 23:33:00 -0400

reblogged from: marco

Some people are criticizing John Gruber’s piece on iPad and Android browser share because Apple-product owners are more likely to visit his site (a bias he clearly acknowledged). I was curious to see more widespread numbers, so I got permission to post Tumblr’s OS percentages from Google Analytics for the tumblelog network.

This includes most human visits to all Tumblr-hosted blogs, not the tumblr.com site itself, to best represent “average” people online who happen to come across Tumblr-hosted sites, not just Tumblr members. Granted, this still isn’t perfect, but it’s probably the biggest and least biased sample that we’ll be able to find in the indie-Mac-pundit world.

Left: Including “normal” computers. Right: Only mobile devices.
Sample from May 9-15, 2010, as measured by Google Analytics.

The most surprising part of this, to me, is how well the Macintosh is faring against Windows. But in the mobile space, Android is actually doing quite well, given its tiny installed base relative to iPhone OS. My premise in this post may have been completely wrong.

The iPad is putting up an especially impressive performance given that it’s only available in the U.S. so far, has only been on sale for 6 weeks, costs at least $500, isn’t subsidized, isn’t always in your pocket, and isn’t being given away in two-for-$99 sales by the largest cellular provider in the country.

PercentMobile:

@marco (and Tumblr), thanks for the breath of fresh air.

Most of the numbers we see online are from mobile analytic services that primarily report on people visiting apps or ads on iPhone, Android, or Blackberry devices. Traffic from the rest of the mobile ecosystem is usually underrepresented and as such marginalized.

The data from the tumblelog network can certainly provide a more realistic sample.

Unfortunately, improving the sample is only part of the equation. The other part is correctly collecting and processing that tumblelog data. Google Analytics is not mobile-specific enough to get the job done.

The report you share shows that Smartphone traffic to tumblelog sites represents approximately 93% of tumblelog mobile device traffic. Trends across PercentMobile’s network of sites tells us that the Smartphone crowd should more likely weigh in at around 47%-68% of total mobile traffic. As such, we suspect considerable Feature Phone (and lesser device traffic) is present but not counted. What does that mean to Tumblr? Hard to place a number on it since we’re at arm’s length to your data but you may have up to 2X the mobile traffic you think you have.

"PercentMobile spots iPhone OS 4 on Verizon!!"

Sat, 22 May 2010 13:48:00 -0400

“PercentMobile spots iPhone OS 4 on Verizon!!”

- @mobileanalytics

JUNE 7th: Mobile Monday NY Relaunch Event (& Party)

Sat, 22 May 2010 12:39:50 -0400

momony:

RSVP to this free event at: http://momonyjune2010.eventbrite.com/

This month Mobile Monday New York is partnering up with Mobile Monday Brooklyn to throw a huge summer kickoff event at 230 Fifth on the roof.

We are planning the event at the beginning of Internet Week, and we are also teaming up with MMA to kick off their Forum New York events.

The topic is mobile advertising and we will have speakers and demos from Crisp Wireless, AdMeld, Jumptap and MMA. Each company will give a brief overview of what they do and their thoughts on the market, followed by demos on the side for more detailed conversations.

Make sure to stay until the end because Jumptap will raffle off an iPad!

Speakers:

Will Nann, National Director of Ad Sales-Crisp Wireless

Marc Theermann, VP, Mobile- AdMeld

Michael Becker, Managing Director, North America- MMA

Paran Johar, CMO-Jumptap

Logistics

Location: 230 Fifth 230 Fifth Ave New York, NY 10001
Date: June 7th at 7 pm
Cost: Free – but registration is required to attend.
Cocktails: Provided
Parking: Garage at 800 6th Avenue. Entrance is on 28th Street between 6th and Broadway (South side)
Transportation:
Subways:
N, R, W to ‘28th Street and Broadway’ Station Stop
F, V, B, D to ‘23rd Street and 6th Avenue’ Station Stop
6 Train to ‘28th Street and Park Avenue’ Station Stop
Buses:
M2 and M3 to Fifth Avenue and 27th Street
M5, M6, and M7 to Broadway and 27th Street

This event is possible thanks to generous sponsorships from AdMeld, Jumptap and Crisp Wireless.

PercentMobile Startup Pitch at the Mobile Premier Awards in...

Tue, 11 May 2010 18:23:00 -0400

PercentMobile Startup Pitch at the Mobile Premier Awards in Barcelona (Alexis Rondeau Presenting.)

Thank you dotopen for making this video available.

In Defense of BlackBerry...

Mon, 03 May 2010 13:37:00 -0400

Over the past several years, the public mobile metrics reports by AdMob (a mobile advertising network that is in the process of being acquired by Google) have been instrumental in proving the relevance of the mobile web. AdMob’s March 2010 Mobile Metrics[1] report illustrates the rise of Android OS[2], a mobile operating system open sourced by their soon to be parent company, Google. According to the report, mobile web usage of the Android OS now eclipses usage of iPhone OS in the US. While we cannot confirm this, the rise of Android OS can be supported by our own data and by the mere fact that in the first 4 months of 2010 alone, 20 new Android OS Experience Phones[3] entered the market worldwide.

PercentMobile sees US mobile Web usage very differently from Admob.

In the March 2010 AdMob Report, they state that the BlackBerry RIM OS[4] has a mobile web usage share in the US of a mere 4%. This is in a country where RIM leads in total smartphone subscribers[5], has a long standing history in the corporate world, and where its president was almost inseparable from his BlackBerry during the election media blitz. At PercentMobile, our numbers state that RIM OS represents 22% of US mobile web usage, composed of Verizon customers with a 44% share and Sprint PCS, T-Mobile and ATT with shares from 18% to 14%.

How Can This Be Explained?

There are multiple factors that can influence the numbers like the entropy of site demographics used for the analysis.

One of the most outstanding factors is that BlackBerry Internet traffic is routed through RIM’s proxy servers in Canada. AdMob mistakenly identifies this mobile web traffic as originating in Canada rather than the US. This contributes to a significant undercount of RIM OS share estimates in the US market.

Another example of the same type of misidentification occurred when we recently tried to log into Facebook from a new T-Mobile BlackBerry Bold and got a security warning that we were logging in from an unknown location and therefore could not be granted access. The next morning, we got a message from Facebook stating that somebody from Canada had tried to log into the account while we were in NYC.

In order to identify the source of a RIM OS request, a mere lookup of IP address of the request is insufficient. It is necessary to look beyond the RIM proxy in order to determine the true source network operator.

At PercentMobile, our mobile-specific business rules are designed to present you with the actual source networks of your visitors rather than the locations of service proxies such as RIM, Novarra, and Opera.

Our Findings

We come to the conclusion that iPhone OS leads mobile web usage in the USA with 48% followed by RIM OS with 22% and Android OS around 5%. We feel that it is imperative that analytics reports are as accurate as possible, and question why AdMob has not corrected their underexposure of RIM OS in the US - a terrific operating system with a large user base and significant share of the mobile Web ecosystem.

References

How We May Use Mobile Phones (or Login Will Replace Sim Cards)

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 13:29:00 -0400

Several months ago we participated in, “mobile trends for the next 10, a collaborative outlook” - curated by Rudy de Waele (@mtrends). As part of our contribution we predicted, “Login will replace Sim Cards.” What follows is a reboot of a conversation we started a year ago and hope you want to have today.

Have a look in your closet or suitcase. You have multiple shirts, jackets, sweaters and a decent amount of socks and underwear. Depending on the occasion, the weather, the time of day, the mood, how well you slept or other conditions you choose a configuration of your clothes. If you slept bad you might choose your very soft sweater, a favorite since 10 years; if you feel super stellar and had a good morning workout you might put on a real modern combo you just got last week. If you have an important job interview you will surely put yourself in clean, respectable clothes. Or maybe you have a date so you will put yourself into something interesting or mysterious. This is not to say that these changes of mood are only reflected in your clothes, of course your whole mannerism is different as well. But that is not the point. Point is, you choose your clothes in anticipation of things to come.

Now imagine for a second a world in which you have to choose a single style that you must wear without mercy for a year straight. What does that kind of relation to an object remind you of?

… it is your beloved mobile phone …

Once chosen, you most likely have to stick with it for a long time. You take it everywhere and use the same phone for all occasions. What’s wrong with that? Nothing really, our phones are born of studies to determine the most popular features for a certain demographic. That’s how most consumer goods come to life. For you as a customer there is always a compromise, a device will fit most of what you desire but not everything. And that is not all, some of your selection criteria are transient and mutate over time; one day you wish had mini projector build in with a very big qwerty keyboard and the other you wish you had one of those real small phones whose battery can last for a week. A super rare Maywa Denki phone shows off your style at a nightclub but its no good to the meeting with your landlord as he might get freaked out by the screaming pulsating exterior color. At the sober business meeting that involves your whole team you don’t want to draw attention with your device, you want to blend in and be a team player, isn’t that the reason you are wearing a suit?

The holy grail of the phone universe is still one device that does it all: Phone, Music Player, Route Planer, Web Browser, Still Camera, Video Camera, Chat Client, Compass, Projector, Office Document Viewer, FM Radio, Game Platform, e-book, Travel Guide, baby monitor, Waterproof, biometric security, Ultrasonic Mosquito Defense, Heart Beat Monitor, Lie Detector, etc . Still, we know how that can end with features galore that confuse and are hard to find when you need them the most.

So, why don’t we have multiple phones? Why can’t we just take the one that fits our mood or the occasion, same as we do with our clothes? Can we not do that already? Certainly you can: just sync your phone first with your laptop or server (this usually doesn’t include your media, call list etc), open the back of your phone and take out the batteries to get to your Sim Card, do another phone surgery and insert your Sim Card to the new device all the while making sure you keep track of each small piece for the next time; not what we call a seamless transition. There is no guarantee that the Sim Card even works and can be considered a violation in your terms of usage. Imagine somebody telling you that combining your D&G shorts with your Nike sneakers is a violation of the terms of usage punishable with 5 years in style prison.

Now, simply take a phone in your hand and start using it. You already do that with scissors, cameras, pens, notebooks, silver ware, and books. You don’t think, you just start using it. You have a drawer with your favorite devices and take the one you want for today. As easy as that. How do I tell the phone that today is its day? One way would be signing in with your username and password, the phone you used in the past gets deactivated. Or if the phone has a fingerprint or iris scanner I could use that for signing in. How about wearing a piece of jewelry with an RFID chip embedded to reprogram the phone when touched by your ring. Your virtual SIM-card. That would be great since you probably wear the jewelry all the time just like the key to your apartment. You need to have some security measures for your devices so that not everybody can touch them and take them over. That might require a list of people allowed to use your devices such as your friends. Using a pen as an analogy again, you ask your friend to use his pen to make notes if you need to. Or ask your brother if you can have its car for the weekend. If you should need to borrow a friends phone to use and access your data for a while, why not?

Let’s discuss some of the consequences of an approach like this. A new richness in form and functionality where design doesn’t need to meet the neutral ground but can go in all kinds of directions. Manufacturers could sell even more phones with the barrier of the one to one relationship broken down. And it hopefully will open the market to new niche manufacturers.

Used Photos
1. photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/perspicacious/3228112810/

License

“How We May Use Mobile Phones” by Stan Wiechers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Based on a work at http://www.merkwelt.com/people/stan/how_we_may_use_cell_phones.html

The Business of Fashion | Why Brands Should Focus on Mobile Web, Not Mobile Apps

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:54:42 -0400

The Business of Fashion | Why Brands Should Focus on Mobile Web, Not Mobile Apps

Scobleizer: Why Steve Jobs is blocking Flash.

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 09:50:10 -0400

I completely buy this. - David Harper

"Hey Adobe, Quit whining and start competing. Use your market position to become dominant in the open..."

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 09:43:29 -0400

“Hey Adobe, Quit whining and start competing. Use your market position to become dominant in the open HTML5 world instead of continuing to exploit the same kind of walled garden that you don’t want Apple to have.”

- I’m with Cocoa (via rafer.tumblr.com)

"When every one of you complains about the exact same kind of restrictions placed on XBox,..."

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 09:40:22 -0400

“When every one of you complains about the exact same kind of restrictions placed on XBox, Playstation, Nintendo, Sony Playstation, then perhaps you’ll have something to stand on. Why people continue to treat Apple as the exception to the rule is beyond me.”

- Tao Effect Blog » Blog Archive » Steve Jobs’ response on Section 3.3.1 (via rafer.tumblr.com)

The Rise of the Experience Phone

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:28:00 -0400

Until the day we lay mobile phones to rest and have Internet access directly via our brains as in Geoff Ryman’s Air, we need to occasionally update our mobile device taxonomy.

Over the last several years, the mobile industry has labeled any phone with features considered advanced at the time of its release under the umbrella of “Smart Phone.” There have been many articles stating the approaching market saturation of this class of devices. Based on our own aggregate Mobile Web usage analytics, we see a 70% Smart Phone saturation in the US alone. It is becoming increasingly apparent to us that the label is becoming less and less important in a world where most new phones are “Smart Phones” or better. As we see it, there is an awkwardness with this “or better” category. It makes no sense to casually toss this new breed of devices that is redefining our relationship with entertainment, friends, and how we interact with the world around us into the same category that never mustered a fraction of the same transformative potential. We hope you agree.

At PercentMobile, we define this new breed of devices as Experience Phones.

What is an Experience Phone?

Experience Phones share several characteristics with Smart Phones: High bandwidth, WiFi capable, High quality camera, Push email, Video and music playback, and the like. The definition of a device as an Experience Phone is not intended to be rigid. Rather, we hope that by grouping features that resonate well with the majority of people in the industry, we can free ourselves to think beyond the outdated term of “Smart Phone.”

What singles out Experience Phones from Smart Phones is a set of features that lay the foundation for richer user experiences:

Intuitive Gesture Based User Interfaces.
Experience phones go beyond the first generation of touch-based interfaces that required the user to actually press the screen and support subtle finger based touch gestures to interact with user interface components. Experience Phones employ highly accurate capacitive touch screens and are powered by high speed mobile chipset’s.

Integrated Full Web Browsing Capabilities.
Advanced CSS and JavaScript support, allowing the ability to load Dynamic Web applications with Ajax capabilities properly. Browsers of Experience Phones typically rival your PC Browser and are standards-compliant. HTML5 support for local data storage, GPS access and Video playback are becoming increasingly more supported.

Seamless Extensibility.
Mobile application discovery and delivery has moved from being a novelty to an imperative feature. Application delivery on Symbian and Windows Mobile Smart Phones was not centralized enough and was too complicated to understand for the average user. Conversely, Experience Phones make it easy to enhance your device with 3rd party applications and widgets using centralized application stores with a clear installation process, helping to make what was once a rare activity into a consumer-friendly procedure.

Sensors.
Experience Phones have a wide range of sensors that allow the device to determine the physical context of the user. Compasses, GPS, RFID Readers, Ambient Light Sensors, Proximity Sensors and 3-Axis Accelerometers are all commonplace.

Smooth Integration.
Experience Phones need to be better than just the sum of their pieces. Hardware, software, UI and network services must integrate clearly and easily so that the user is able to focus solely on the task at hand. When any of the comprising pieces are lacking, the overall experience suffers and the user is thrown back to having to “figure things out”. An Experience Phone has to “just work right”.

What Devices are Experience Phones?

Apple disrupted the status quo in 2007 when it launched the iPhone — the first device that meets our definition of an Experience Phone. This placed intense pressure on existing mobile phone manufacturers to respond or be left behind. That response was mostly taken in the form of a new class of devices that run Google’s Android OS. In the first 3 months of 2010, we have seen Android usage increase steadily with the release of 19 new phones across several manufacturers, while other contenders have emerged or been announced such as Windows Mobile 7, MeeGo and the first bada OS device.

In 2010, we are witnessing the rise of the Experience Phone!

Experience Phone and Experience Phone Logo by PercentMobile.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.