A very straightforward premise underlies the work we do as a mobile team at Comscore: collect the best possible data about the dynamic mobile market and turn it into actionable insight that our clients can rely on to run their businesses.
But while our focus is simple, the mobile space we’re measuring is increasingly complex. It’s a landscape filled with multiple device platforms, competing content ecosystems based on both device technology platforms and operator networks, and emerging classes of devices such as tablets and eBook readers that further complicate what we think of as “mobile.”
Our approach to this complexity has been to thoughtfully measure the mobile market using an array of methodologies and data sources including a metered panel of Smartphones (Mobile Metrix), a sophisticated, multi-market online survey (MobiLens).
This week we’re providing clients with an additional source of data as we debut mobile-optimized tagging for publishers.
While mobile page views to PC-optimized Web pages are currently included in the “Other” category as part of the MMX Universe report, this new extension of our Unified Digital Measurement™ initiative provides a mobile-optimized tag designed to fully measure the traffic to mobile-optimized Web sites and applications. For example, while mobile traffic to www.nytimes.com is tracked by existing Comscore tags, our mobile tags are designed for mobile-optimized sites such as m.nytimes.com or nytimes.mobi.
Our internal research has demonstrated that mobile platforms such as Android, iPhone, and RIM often elicit behavior very different than PCs and that there are even substantial differences between different versions of the same platform. Audience measurement support is uneven across devices and each platform handles cookies differently or doesn’t accept them at all. The Comscore mobile tag was developed to capture traffic across the major smartphone platforms, hundreds of feature phones, and mobile devices including iOS, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows, and Symbian operating systems.
This granular measurement of the mobile Web will be complemented later this month when we debut application analytics for Apple, Android, and RIM platforms, which will take us yet another step closer to rounding out a more comprehensive picture of the mobile media landscape.
Comscore’s mobile Web tagging is simple to implement and is available today at no cost to publishers worldwide. For more information, please contact your account representative. Not a client? For more information and to participate, please email mobiletaginfo@comscore.com.