iPhone Analytics & Location Based Ad Targeting– Prohibited by Apple

App Analytics

It appears that, according to the new developer agreement, iPhone and iPad developers cannot use any 3rd party analytics application to collect any kind of iPhone or iPad usage data. According to the clause,
Device Data may not be provided or disclosed to a third party without Apple’s prior written consent. Accordingly, the use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited.
(Source: Apple Changes Rules on iPhone App Analytics)

It is not clear what the “Device Data” actually means. Does it just cover the OS/Browser, screen size etc. or does it cover any data collected by the app?
However, based on an email from an iPhone developer, referenced in a venturebeat.com blog post, it appears that this clause might cover pretty much any data collected via the applications.

> We’ve reviewed your
> application and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone
> application to the App Store. It is not appropriate for applications to
> gather user analytics. Specifically, you may not collect anonymous play
> data from a user’s game. A screenshot of this issue has been attached for
> your reference.
>
> In order for your application to be reconsidered for the App Store, please
> resolve this issue and upload your new binary to iTunes Connect.


Ad Targeting

Part of this clause is also a statement about location-based ad targeting.
“The use of location-based User Data for enabling targeted advertising in an Application is prohibited unless targeted advertising is the purpose of such Application (e.g., a geo-location coupon application).”

Some other great post on this topic are

• An Open Letter to Steve Jobs by Eric Peterson
• Updated: New iPhone Developer Agreement Bans the Use of Third-Party Analytics and Services

Is this a step to control all advertising on iPhone and iPad? Is Apple is about to roll out its own iPhone and iPad analytics solution? Perhaps buy one of the existing vendors?

What are your thoughts?

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CMS Watch Report on Web and Mobile Analytics Tools

CMS watch various web analytics tools in their yearly report. This year they expanded the scope to include Mobile analytics vendors as well. It evaluated a total of 20 commercial tool and 4 open source web analytics tools. This is the most comprehensive report on this subject.
Here is a list of tools that this report evaluated:

Web Analytics

Coremetrics - Online Analytics

Digital River - Fireclick Advanced Warehouse

Yahoo! - Yahoo! Web Analytics

Nedstat - Sitestat

VisiStat - VisiStat 6.0

Omniture - SiteCatalyst

Intellitracker - Intellitracker Enterprise R6

Google - Google Analytics

Foviance - WebAbacus

Auriq Systems - RTmetrics

Lyris - ClickTracks

Unica - Affinium NetInsight 7.2

Google - Google Urchin 6.5

WebTrends - Analytics 8.5

Mobile Analytics

Mobilytics - Mobilytics

AdMob - AdMob Mobile Analytics

Amethon Solutions - Mobile Analytics v1.5.3

Bango - Bango Analytics 3.0

Video Analytics

GlanceGuide - my GlanceGuide

Visible Measures - VisibleSuite 209


Open Source Analytics Tools

Analog

AwStats

phpMyVisits

Webalizer


Yahoo Web Analytics came close to Omniture, Webtrends and Coremetrics in feature set. (I came to same conclusion in my blog post last year on Yahoo Web Analytics.)

Comparing Yahoo Web Analytics and Google Analytics, Yahoo is clearly the winner.
However, I would like to make it clear that you need to look at your needs and determine which tool will work best for you. For example, Google Analytics clearly works better than Yahoo Web Analytics when you spend a lot of money on AdWords and need easy integration of web analytics and Adwords.

This report has done all the research for you and will defiantly save a lot of time and headache. You can buy the report at CMS Watch’s Site

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Mobile Analytics

According to Nielsen Mobile the adoption of the mobile web has reached a critical mass. Nielsen says that, as of May 2008, 15.6 percent of mobile subscribers in the US make regular use of the mobile Internet on their devices, totaling some 40 million subscribers. This is just a subset of the 95 million US mobile subscribers who pay for access to the mobile Internet (through data plans or some other setup) but don't use it quite so regularly.

Despite such a surge in mobile internet usage business are lacking in measuring the mobile traffic. A recent survey by Omniture found that 71% of businesses are not measuring mobile traffic to their sites. It also found that 50 percent of businesses do not even know how many unique users landing on their sites originate from a mobile device.
Measuring Mobile internet traffic, also called “Mobile Analytics” is not easy, we are still dealing with the accuracy issues with web analytics and now Mobile analytics provides its own set of unique challenges.

Judah Philips in his post on Metrics insider covers a comprehensive list of challenges that Mobile Analytics faces.

Some of the key challenges he lists are

• Data Collection –JavaScript is the most common way of collecting data for web analytics, but not all the mobile browsers execute JavaScript.


• Unique visitor identification - due to lack of cookie support and the changing of IP addresses it is a challenge to uniquely identify a user.


• Traffic source detection - Determining the source of traffic, such as search, email, direct entry, RSS feeds, and marketing campaigns can be challenging in the mobile space.


• Geographic identification - Where are the visitors viewing your site coming from? But not all devices enable geographic detection because the gateway’s IP address is used, not a GPS signal.

Mobile Analytics Solutions

A lot of Mobile Analytics solutions have sprung up in past year or so and more are coming up (See my prediction for 2008). Some of the established web analytics vendors are also now offering Mobile Analytics solutions. These solutions widely differ in their technology, process and capabilities. Which solution will work for you will depend on your needs (In future I might compare some of these vendors on this blog, but meanwhile if you would like help in evaluating a solution you can email me at batraonline at gmail.com). Below is the list of current mobile analytics vendors that I am aware of.

• Admob


• Amethon


• Bango


• Coremetrics


• DeckStats


• mobileStats


• Mobilytics


• Motally


• Nedstat


• Omniture


• Tigtags


• XiTi

Other Resources you might be interested in

• The challenge of mobile analytics - Part 1


• The Challenge of Mobile Web Analytics


• Mobile Analytics: Omniture and Bango


• Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Advertising Revenue to Surpass $2.7 Billion in 2008

Did I miss any tool/solution? Email me at batraonline at gmail.com

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