During the “Meaningful Analytics: Reaching The Customer By Moving to Upstream, Downstream and Device Info” session, panelists discussed how they incorporated mobile into their day-to-day initiatives. The panel was moderated by Ian Grody, senior conference producer at Worldwide Business Research, New York.

“With mobile you can get down to the exact demographic and neighborhood,” said Josh Himwich, vice president of ecommerce solutions at Quidsi, New York.

Mobile focus
According to Mr. Himwich, it is important to make sure that if a company has a commerce-enabled mobile site they need to make sure that it does not take a consumer more than five minutes to complete the transaction.

“You want to try to create that experience in five minutes or less,” Mr. Himwich said.

Quidsi, an ecommerce company and parent of Diapers.com, Soap.com and BeautyBar.com has been doing a lot in the mobile space.

In April, Soap.com and Diapers.com rolled out iPhone applications that let consumers make purchases even if they are in a no-service area.

Shopping on the Soap and Diapers apps lets customers select items to purchase even when they are without service or Wi-Fi access and still have their orders delivered for free in one or two days.

Additionally, earlier this year Soap.com ran banner and audio ads within Pandora’s mobile application offering listeners 20 percent of their purchases.

Consumers had the option of clicking on the banner ad to get their discount. After looking for the products they want, customers could have used the offer code “Pandora” to get the promotion.

“I think a lot of it begins with who your core customer is and for us it’s busy urbanites,” Mr. Himwich said. “Our core customer values the time that we give to them.”

Target audience
According to Jeff Ulrich, senior manager of emerging technology at United Airlines, Houston, TX, it is important to know who your target audience is and how to best serve them.

The executive also said that measurement is very important in mobile.

“We’re relatively new to the game and I think looking back at it, it would have been helpful to also spend time figuring out what we wanted to measure,” Mr. Ulrich said.

“To often we put too many requirements with what we want an app or site to do and don’t track the back-end and then you’re scrambling to find that information,” he said.

“I want to see where people are going in the app aside from the usual metrics of what they’re spending so I know what areas to enhance or work on going forward.”

According to Janet Jaiswal, senior director of global product marketing at Tealeaf, San Francisco, in the beginning of the mobile cycle, companies focus a lot on understanding the demographic they are targeting.

“Over time, as it expands you want to understand the users,” Ms. Jaiswal said. “What’s working and what’s not.

“You want to understand how that’s affecting your key metrics,” she said.

Final Take
Rimma Kats is staff reporter on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York