Autoglass® is the UK’s leading vehicle glass repair and replacement company and part of the Belron® group which operates in 28 countries including the US (where it trades as Safelite). Chris Smith, online marketing manager at Autoglass®, decided to test the waters in mobile – “People keep saying that this year will be the year of mobile, and I’m sure it will come one day, so I want to make sure Autoglass® is there when it does” said Smith.
The mobile site, autoglass.mobi, is a stripped-down version of the main site with a number for people to call when they need an emergency glass repair or replacement. In time, Autoglass® will implement device detection on the main site and route people to the PC or mobile website depending upon the type of device they are browsing from, but for the time being, Autoglass® runs a separate .mobi site and is driving traffic directly to that site.
When it came to measuring traffic though, Autoglass® found that Google Analytics was not up to the job. Google Analytics uses JavaScript to analyze traffic, which most mobiles cannot run so the data was pretty basic. “It would tell us we had 100% direct visitors and so on, but it wouldn’t give me any breakdown on where those visitors were coming from,” commented Smith. “It was obvious it wasn’t really a workable solution for mobile. I didn’t want to spend money on advertising if I couldn’t measure the result, and what people were doing on the site.”
Autoglass® selected Bango Analytics so it could analyze who was visiting the mobile site and measure the response rates for a variety of mobile marketing campaigns. By inserting a single line of code into the home page of Autoglass.mobi, Bango recorded page views using familiar image tag technology enhanced with Bango unique user identification capabilities.
The Bango metrics show the country, network and device of all their visitors as well as how many unique users they had. “Having a unique user count is dear to my heart,” said Smith, “without this I can’t accurately measure how the site is growing as a result of the marketing campaigns I run.” Knowing which handsets are accessing the mobile site is also important as it enables Autoglass® to optimize the mobile site for the top mobile devices specific to their service.
Autoglass® compared the click-through and conversion rates for the mobile marketing campaigns they ran - banner ads and search marketing through Yahoo! A Bango tracking link was added to each campaign so the user is re-directed via Bango to the landing page, the same approach used by many ad-tracking companies. It uses the same Bango User ID to identify unique visitors and additionally passes back the user identification, country, operator and handset for each campaign. “We found conversion rates were higher for our search marketing campaigns,” added Smith. “This is not really surprising as chances are when you discover damage to the windows of your car, the one thing you’ll have to hand is a mobile phone and it’s more natural to simply search for a service that can help you. We’re what you might call a distress purchase!”