As more and more people use their mobile devices as their primary device to obtain information, marketers and advertisers are keen to understand the constantly changing mobile behaviour of their customers. Research says that there is 72% people using smartphones, while the figure is only 62% in the U.S.

So, the ComScore Inc. came up with this technology that could monitor and measure online traffic and gather data for further analysis. They could use these data to identify the demographics of visitors, when and how many people visit the site in a particular day. They could also summarize these information into a more easy-to-understand one that companies can use to know their traffic pattern and whether their online campaigns are reaching out to their customers.

Hoping to better understand their customers, many U.S and U.K companies are using this system to track down their customer mobile activity. While I was feeling like this system is somewhat similar to Google Analytics which basically does the exact same thing, mobile-measurement system is what differentiates ComScore.

While Google Analytics could only provides data over visits that are done on laptops, mobile measurement system could measure actives on any mobile device. Mobile measurement are based on a survey panel of 3,000 to 5,000 Canadians that roughly represent the population. They would allow the research firm to tract their daily activity on their smartphones and tablets, and report their mobile behaviours through surveys. This valuable data will give companies full picture and landscape of effectiveness of their campaign. It also gives direction in which companies should improve on.

However, it comes down to several potential threats and problems:

1. Using sample of 3,000 to 5,000 Canadian, how do we make sure they are representative enough to give an comprehensive data?

2. How would these set of data satisfy the different needs of every company who has different intention to purchase this system?

3. If this method of data-collecting were to expand, how does privacy issue come about?

 

There are definitely some tradeoffs between monitoring and privacy. Third party monitoring and information sharing is nothing new in the digital market, but third party monitoring on mobile devices might be something advertisers need to look out for. No one likes the feeling of being spied on or peeped at.

I am pretty sure our smartphones have built in tool that track our daily activities, just like iCloud stores some important content for Apple users. How can marketers and advertisers take advantages of this tremendous amount of data and make sense of it in the marketing world is what i want to keep an eye out for.