The unique attributes of mobile devices and mobile ad networks have made it difficult to trust the accuracy of campaign reports provided by mobile ad servers or the usage reports of mobile sites and applications. Crisp sometimes provides 3rd party reports to publishers or agencies that show significant discrepancies against the reports of other measurement servers. Regardless of which report is right or wrong, this issue has been a major barrier to effectively sell mobile media to advertisers.
The staff of the IAB and the MMA, together with the MRC and the GSMA and two dozen other mobile companies (including Crisp), have recently written the ‘Mobile Web Advertising Measurement Guidelines’. This document has now been released for public comment. This document provides some general guidelines as well as mobile specific guidelines. These 22 pages are a good step forward towards providing the different parties a way of determining the quality of their measurements.
In a white paper Crisp wrote last month, ‘Measurement on Mobile,’ we dug a little deeper into the different causes of the mobile measurement accuracy problems. Our white paper provides a history and overview of the mobile measurement methods, followed by a list of potential problems and ends with some basic recommendations.
The mobile ecosystem has witnessed extreme growth and continuing fragmentation, but methods are now available to extend the mature desktop ad serving infrastructure into mobile without introducing the many mobile measurement problems that were typical in the past. If you are involved in mobile advertising, I recommend reading both the IAB-MMA guidelines and the Crisp white paper.
The unique attributes of mobile devices and mobile ad networks have made it difficult to trust the accuracy of campaign reports provided by mobile ad servers or the usage reports of mobile sites and applications. Crisp sometimes provides 3rd party reports to publishers or agencies that show significant discrepancies against the reports of other measurement servers. Regardless of which report is right or wrong, this issue has been a major barrier to effectively sell mobile media to advertisers.