Brands: Why you need more than traditional metrics in mobile

Victor Milligan, CMO, Nexage: Analytics needs to be able to uncover patterns and cause-effect relationships that enable businesses, in this case brands, to make decisions. Using this example, iOS and Android percentages may simply reveal consumer trends that have little to do with advertising. What would be useful is to understand demographic and economic patterns, and prior campaign results across the entire market, for specific content channels, for specific publisher inventory, and how those patterns change over time. With these insights, brands can determine how to design or optimize campaigns to maximize reach and campaign results.

Your question has great meaning: analytics needs to get beyond "the what" to develop insights that are directly applicable and meaningful to how market participants make decisions.

Kristina: What metrics will help brands better perform?

Victor: The quick and easy answer is to define metrics that enable brands to reach the audience that produces the best result in the most efficient manner possible. If we look at one part of the puzzle--how do brands decide how to reach specific audience, at the desired scale--the insights can come into view. So campaign performance at scale means that the brand can look at the different targeting parameters (demographic, behavioral, location, etc.) and understand reach, prior campaign performance, the likely cost to execute, among other factors to design an optimal campaign, at scale. Once executed, it will be important to look at ongoing performance to adapt and tune the campaign.

Kristina: Tell me about the new Nexage product?

Victor: Nexage is applying granular, pattern-based analytics to provide our customers--sellers, buyers, and brands--with insights they otherwise would not have, including patterns that are otherwise hidden, the ability to continually optimize and improve their business, as well as give signals to the market as to how mobile advertising behaves and is evolving. We are doing this by building a cube--an analytic asset that enables us to look at and relate any dimension at the most granular level--and analytic assets that gives us the ability to provide business intelligence and predictive analytics in one package. Using this asset, we are bringing three types of analytics to market:

a. Customer analytics for publishers and buyers to provide in-depth analytics and patterns to enable them to tune and adjust their business to yield the best results

b. Exchange analytics to analyze and predict the behavior, patterns, and trends of our exchange that enhance liquidity and value-creation

c. Market analytics to identify trends that are shaping mobile advertising as we see them on our Nexage Exchange

Kristina: What do the new metrics from Nexage do that traditional metrics do not?

Victor: First, we think mobile advertising is a good example of a market that requires, but lacks in-depth, detailed and pattern-driven analytics. The market is producing "big data", but market participants benefit from (and need) to make decisions at a very detailed level. The market is dynamic, but it is too opaque to most, and much of the current analytics is tied to marketing hype or views that are interesting, but not designed or applicable to make operational decisions. Our analytic capability is designed to address this gap; providing our customers with detailed, fact-based analytics that enable them to make the individual decisions to maximize results and provide the market with insights that give them a fair view of how the market is really behaving and evolving.

Tags: mobile ad performance, mobile analytics, mobile marketing, Nexage