How to better engage the mobile audience

For the past several months, a lot has been written about optimizing content for specific users' tastes. By doing this, publishers and marketers have a better chance at engaging the audience, thereby enhancing the ROI of campaigns. For mobile marketers and publishers, optimizing or personalizing the content offers to user interests is even more important. Enter a new service from ChangingWorlds which tracks users' habits and offers content based on their prior choices.

by Kristina Knight

Sprint is the first US mobile carrier to offer these personalized pages. Here is how it works: the platform tracks how a user interacts with content and offers during their mobile surfing sessions. As patterns emerge, the content and offers from the most visited mobile websites is leeched onto their mobile homepages. The data is also used to change the look of specific portal so that users' preferred content is suited to their past actions.

Because the actual navigation menus are changed to suit a users' preferences, the user is more likely to become immediately engaged because the content they are most interested in is placed in the top positions. This reduces the distance that mobile users need to go to reach local news headlines, ticketing information or even the latest offering from an oft-visited etailing site.

The engine also recommends some content based on the content a user has engaged with in the past. It also recommends "also purchased" information. For example, if User A downloads the latest Kid Rock ring tune, the engine will give them information about similar downloads made by other users.