Advertising and measurement company Quantcast is launching a new service today called Measure for Mobile Apps. As the name implies, it collects data on the usage of a publisher’s iOS and Android apps.
The service is available for free, and it offers information on app traffic, how that traffic breaks down by device, how it breaks down by app version, and return usage. (Quantcast notes that showing that there are “engaged consumers” returning to an app can make it more valuable to advertisers.) Those reports can be kept private for use by the company and its partners, or they can be displayed publicly on the Quantcast site.
“By directly measuring mobile app consumption, publishers and advertisers can drill down beyond app installations to learn key insights including audience loyalty and usage,” Quantcast co-founder and CEO Konrad Feldman says in the press release announcing the new service.
More significant than any individual statistic, however, may be the fact that Quantcast’s new mobile app data can be viewed in the same dashboard as its desktop and mobile web stats. For example, discussion site Topix (where more than half the traffic is mobile) is an early Measure for Mobile Apps customer — you can see its Quantcast app profile here. CEO Chris Tolles told me that it’s “annoying that all of the app measurement stuff is separate from the mobile web side.”
Tolles said that treating mobile app data (through services like AppData) as something with different metrics accessed through a separate service may have worked for app-only developers, “but for the rest of us (the ad driven web) this is a non starter.” So Measure for Mobile Apps sets up a “path of normalization” between the “weirdly bifurcated” of web and mobile apps, he said.
