TNS Gallup, Finnish subsidiary of the biggest industry market research expert TNS Global, has teamed up with a mobile customer experience management startup QAim to provide Finland wide tracking of mobile website usage metrics.
QAim provides the technology needed for tracking the mobile users, and TNS Gallup takes care of the related user metrics service, support, and sales. The firms hope the new service will provide the media industry with a unified, reliable, and independent metrics of the mobile website usage, similar to what is already available for the traditional web, TV, and radio.
As mobile internet usage grows all the time, there is a clear need for being able to track and follow mobile sites’ traffic and visitor behavior. Most mobile service providers have very little clue as to who actually uses their services, where, how, when, and for which parts. Also, without public benchmarks the service providers have a difficult time trying to measure and improve their service and user experience, and to sell advertising. Thus there should be good international expansion possibilities for the metrics service as well.
TNS Gallup comments that it found QAim’s solution the best of the evaluated, while tracking mobile site usage is far from trivial. For QAim the upside from the partnership seems rather good, as not only does the firm get much improved visibility, but the metrics service will also include QAim’s primary CEM4Mobile Analytics with which the metrics service customers can also manage the user experience of their mobile sites much better.
QAim’s CEM4Mobile is a rather groovy product, offering real time analysis of mobile site usage patterns and customer experience, unique user and customer trends tracking (first-timer, returning, active, loyal, dormant, churned), usage paths to and within the service, and how marketing campaigns affect the user behavior. There are also loads of other useful options like tracking handset capabilities, and easy polling for end-user opinions.
QAim has finalized the product development with close to 20 local pilot customers, including mobile operators, service providers and media houses (for example, media house MTV3 Finland, weather service Foreca, and mobile operator Elisa).
QAim Founder and CEO Janne Aalto boasts that integrating the CEM4Mobile components and starting collecting data takes just from 15 minutes up to one hour, depending on the amount of pages in the site. The pilot use has been quite extensive, and so far QAim has collected data of approx five million users from 203 countries, 554 mobile networks, and 3,891 handsets. QAim is now in a strong internationational expansion phase to Europe and Asia with the help of selected integration partners.
The product is delivered with Software as a Service (SaaS) model over the Internet, which allows QAim to aggreate anonymous statistics from different websites and thus provide the geographical metrics service. Janne Aalto commented that originally their team thought a local installation option would be preferred by the customers, but to their (pleasant) surprise they found out everybody has actually opted for the simple SaaS delivery. The customers have in fact been asking for anonymous benchmark data of other services similar to theirs.
Aalto described that in one case a director mentioned he actually was embarrassed to go to management group meetings as he had no data to show from the mobile site he was responsible of, while the web service guys had everything you could ask for – talk about a problem with strong personal motivation to solve…
QAim’s business model is based on different product feature packs and the number of monthly transactions registered by the service. The firm is owned by the founders, key employees, private investors and a VC.
