The Mobile Developer

Quite a lot of development has gone into mobislim recently. We have added the latest bango mobile analytics tracking tools to the site. These include bgo_campaign parameters etc. and these are passed to the site via the request query parameters. Once any of the 6 valid bango parameters are detected by the site, they are stored in the users session and are appending on all page tracking numbers and all bango relay numbers. Therefore we can track where a user has come from campaign wise, for every bit of content they download, and even when they register.

We had a bit of a dillema when adding this functionality, since in order to maintain session states for devices which do not have cookies enabled, you need to store the jsessionid in the parameters, and we removed the functionality for this when we began our mobile seo experiments. This was because we saw that google had picked up the sites with different jsessionid’s and were treating the same pages as different pages but with the same content and thus punsishing our rankings for it. However, I have read that google now has better support for both query parameters and jsession id’s… so lets see because afterall the most important thing is the mobile analytics - since without it you can’t really tell if your mobile seo is working optimally or not.

We now have 4 versions of mobislim. There is mobislim.com sa.mobislim.com which has some south african commedy videos on it and there is also the d2c.mobislim.com which we built for TMobile in the States. Finally there is the iphone version of mobislim. It is still on a staging url but I will put it onto a proper mobislim url soon and write about the fun I had with javascript, ajax, dodgy stylesheets etc doing that…

Animation FC did a great campaign with the Daily Star today, in conjunction with Manchester United Football Club and Bango mobile billing and analytics. With a front page ad for the Man U free wallpapers and free Premier Club screensavers, we were delivering a content item every few seconds and I was pleasantly surprised to discover the servers were running at less than 5% processor utlisation.

Obviously we used Bango for the wap site discovery and billing on the cross sell items. So, not only did we get great conversions on the upsells but we also enjoyed the benefits of premier league mobile analytics!

These promotions with the Daily Star will be ongoing, so we are looking forward to the official release in the new bango analytics API which will give us *even better* campaign tracking for cross sell items (if that is possible)!