MW08 – Mobile Panel Question #1 – what mobile data is available to agencies in Canada?

Earlier this week I moderated the mobile panel on digital day at Marketing Week. We had an animated discussion and thanks to our friends at Magnet Mobile, we had a “txt your question” segment where we invited the audience to participate in the discussion.

We managed to answer many questions – but there were too many great questions left unanswered.

Over the next several days I’ll post & respond to all the great questions that we didn’t have time to get to. Feel free to comment & provide your own POV as well.

Q: What mobile data is available to agencies in Canada?

A: Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of data available to marketers and agencies in Canada yet. The CWTA publishes a quarterly report with high level SMS usage stats that include total peer to peer by month and YTD. It also reports on the % of unique users. You can get the details at http://www.cwta.ca. I also summarize & publish the highlights on this blog and you can search the archives for past data

To help fill the data gap, the company I work for has started collecting some behavioural /demographic data on SMS programs that we run in-house which we can anecdotally apply across the board. We also track usage patterns from our own mobile web programs.

For mobile advertising stats, be sure follow Admob -they’re a global leader in mobile advertising and frequently report on their own network usage broken out by country.

The leader in Mobile metrics (m:metrics) was recently bought out by Comscore; however, they don’t offer anything on the Canadian market. Hopefully this will change in the coming year as marketers are hungry for more data.

In summary -there is an opportunity for a data aggregator to develop relationships with Carriers and other ecosystem players in Canada to provide marketers and agencies some much needed insight.  We’re even willing to pay for it