We are now iphone enabled! As a first step towards full mobile compability, starting today, FrontEndBook.com is also available through your iPhone or iPod Touch. I found this great WordPress plugin/theme bundle: iWPhone.
I am writing a longer article on how I believe iPhone will change the mobile web, subscribe to our RSS-feed in order to read the article when it is ready for publishing.
Update: Read our longer post on how iPhone and Android will change the way we use the web.
11 Comments
Cool! I have just started using this myself. I am totally sold on mobile blogging.
Great news!
Maybe you can figure out how to track advertising performance for people who sell iPhone Apps. Our iPhone app is http://www.snocator.com and it provides GPS enabled trail maps, snow reports, mountian cams, etc. for 200+ resorts in the US and Canada. A lot of cool stuff.
We are trying to use google adwords, admob, facebook, etc. to drive traffic and sales.
We have not been able to find an app that will track conversions for iPhone App Store sales. Any ideas?
Nice blog by the way!!! I read you alot
Dan
@Dan: As I see it the problem exists of a lot of different conversion points
1. CTR on ads, this could be monitored using the tools the ad-platform provide
2. Make sure you have different landing-pages or parameters depending on ad-platform in order to be able to track which ad-clicking visitors converts best on your site
3. Track CTR on your page depending on type of user: bought traffic, organic traffic, direct traffic, affiliate traffic etc
4. When it comes to tracking sales on App Store it is, as far as I know, only possible to get monthly reports on how your app is selling. In order to get a better statistical approach on your app sales, App Store needs to enable you to send some unique identifier that you later can match towards your reports you get from Apple. But my guess is that you only can measure the number of people you have sent to App Store and compare it to how many sold units for that time period. The problem with that solution is that you do not get a good quality score on the ad-network you are using (if you are using more than one), one way to circumvent that could be to only buy ads from one source during a period of time and compare the results. But that is also somewhat misleading as you compare different timespans, but maybe it could give you insight on what method of advertising converts better. These are only ideas, but I am pretty sure someone has a good solution for tracking these kind of conversions.
Edit: I found this site: http://www.pinchmedia.com, They claim to help you with stats for app downloads and such
Hi Mattias,
Thanks for the input. I am talking with Greg over at pinchmedia.com , and we have it installed on out iPhone app snocator.com.
We don’t have a solution. You are on the right track with the unique identifier, and each iPhone has one. Lot of privacy issues there. No one has enabled use of it yet.
I am running ads on Facebook, Admob, Google, etc. Looks like my short term solution is to drive visitors to a web page, and use the “onclick” capability in Google Analytics to count the number of people who click a DOWNLOAD NOW button. Crazy!!
Without some form of advertsing ROI measurement, iPhone Apps as an advertising medium will not mature. I am sure Android will figure it out and integrate with Google Analytics and Adwords.
I need to call my friends over at Admob and Omniture to see what they know.
Cheers,
Dan
I’ve been using iWPhone myself for quite some time, in combination with Wordpress Mobile Edition for rendering on other handsets. This, however, results only in mediocre mobile compliance…
Last week I’ve switched to Mobilepress – a great plugin which combines both & generated much better (i.e. mobile-optimized) HTML-output. I’ve compiled some advice on this at:
http://nonsmokingarea.com/blog/2008/11/22/wordpress-mobile-optimization/
Michael Kamleitner´ s last blog post..Wordpress – mobile optimization
@Michael: Thanks for the tips, I will look into the plugin and your post. Actually I turned iWPhone off a couple of weeks ago since it did not fulfill my needs.
Why do people talk about the iPhone changing the way we use the web?
Sure it has Apple branding, but there are many, many phones that can accomplish exactly the same thing without the contractual tie-ins that the Apple-Cellphone Operators impose.
Google and Android may actually be the killer …. for most people Google epitomises the web.
@WebComp Analyst: I believe Android and iPhone will change the web, not because of the technical capabilities alone, but also because of the spread of the device and its non-geek audience.
I think the iphone will definitely change the world uses the web. Maybe not in the last 2 versions of the iphone, but by the 5th version people will find using a PC futile when they can accomplish the same on the iphone.
Thanks for this helpful resources
wow, nice article. keep posting.don