Businesses Rushing To Keep Up With Mobile Data

Mobile devices are being used for more and more everyday activities, creating a huge amount of data that marketing departments need to deal with in order to leverage the channel more efficiently, writes Econsultancy analyst Bola Awoniyi. This struggle is part of the transformation that the digital analytics sector is experiencing under the influence of mobile devices, which are beginning to account for more and more online traffic.

So far, web analytic tools have focused on measuring desktop traffic, but given the mobile boom the scope of these tools has expanded significantly. Demand for data measurement is rising at a dramatic pace and is paralleled by the increase in the amount of data that needs to be measured and the emergence of new methods for doing it, says chief marketing officer for Socialbakers, Neil Morgan.

What this means is that marketers are faced with a staggering amount of data which they have to make sense of before coming out of the process with productive, applicable conclusions. Mobile analytics is growing at an impressive rate because businesses want to see how the mobile channel compares to desktop and how mobile analytics compares to overall analytics.

However, just because they are spending more on mobile analytics does not mean they are understanding it better, Awoniyi notes. Marketers still harbour doubts about the potential of big data and are not seeing it as a significant part of their future strategies, despite the fact the benefits of utilising it can be substantial. Within five years, marketing departments will have more tools to harness big data and use it to gain actionable insights into customer behaviour, which is a development worth thinking about, Awoniyi suggests.