Mobile advertising network InMobi launched today its free InMobi Ad Tracker platform, a solution that does not leverage a mobile handset’s universal device identifier (UDID) to track, integrates with the InMobi Advertising Network and incorporates real-time analytics, said Anne Frisbie, the company’s North American VP and managing director.
The platform measures conversions on mobile web, app and mobile email campaigns. “From a direct marketing standpoint, this gives marketers a new set of tools to measure how their mobile campaigns are working,” Frisbie said. “It will help companies realize what type of ads work well and help them budget for mobile. Lots of hardcore direct marketers have been running campaigns on mobile that didn’t track as well as they should have.”
Frisbie adds that InMobi Ad Tracker “tracks whatever you want to track: email forms for leads, app downloads—which is the most common thing people are trying to generate out in the mobile ecosystem today—sales and engagement rates.”
Key to the release of InMobi Ad Tracker, Frisbie said, is the fact that InMobi Ad Tracker does not rely on the universal device identifier (UDID) to track mobile devices. UDIDs are hard-coded into every mobile device. However amid concerns that UDIDs constitute personally identifiable information (PII), Apple announced in Aug. 2011 that it would begin deprecating UDIDs, restricting app developers from leveraging them. In March, Apple began rejecting apps that used UDIDs.
“The scale of your campaign is impacted if you’re using just UDIDs,” Frisbie said. “Whatever you’re measuring isn’t going to be viable in the long term.”
Consequently, InMobi Ad Tracker monitors mobile devices by looking at other identifiers, such as cookies, said InMobi product manager François Deschênes, and if the mobile user has deactivated cookies on his device, the platform tracks via the Open Device Identification Number (ODIN). InMobi soon hopes to future-proof InMobi Ad Tracker. “If one of these technologies gets deprecated in the future, the platform can still go forward,” said Deschênes.
InMobi Ad Tracker, in general release today, is offered to InMobi clients without any associated fee. It works with all mobile ad networks, Frisbie said, and runs on Android and iOS, supporting browsers and in-app inventory for both operating systems; it supports browser access on Windows Phone 7 and RIM operating systems.
