Mobile marketing as a business is changing on a daily basis and if you aren’t at the forefront of what’s happening… the whole mobile revolution could pass you by.  Our CEO, Bradley Reynolds and marketing director, Kathleen Murphy Colan authored the 10-page paper “Mobile Marketing for Business: an Overview (Part I)” which details the statistics, successes, challenges and future possibilities for mobile marketing.  Download your free copy today. 

We’ve recently joined the Twitterverse and we’re looking for quality Tweeps to follow and engage with for conversation about the best practices across a wide range of online marketing topics.

Please let us know your Twitter handle and we’ll make the connection. BTW, we’re finding the medium refreshing as we connect and engage with like-minded folks who want to have intelligent conversations. 

Feel free to follow us @mongoosemetrics for intelligence pointing to the best trends and innovations in call tracking, web analytics, ROI analysis, PPC advertising, SEO, SEM, social media marketing and conversion tracking.

Businesses on both sides of the Atlantic now can see which marketing efforts drive phone calls with local and toll-free call tracking numbers from Mongoose Metrics.  Details on our partnership with British Telecom and Virgin are housed at our newly launched website www.mongoosemetrics.co.uk.  Visitors to the site can easily navigate to view service coverage areas, dowload informative white papers and get access to the latest resources about innovations in the call tracking industry in the United Kingdom.  The website also helps visitors by showcasing customer testimonials, pricing, demos and value propositions. 

Thanks to prolific blogger Joe “Giuseppe” Zuccaro, aka The Marketing Consigliere (www.marketing-consigliere.com) for educating his readers about the power of call tracking.  His entertaining take — complete with an adorable picture of a mongoose wearing headphones — simply explains how and why marketers are using call tracking with CRM vendors such as SalesForce CRM.  Click here for the story, “Tracking Phone Conversion Like a Mongoose.”

We’re delighted to let everyone know that we’ve launched www.calltracking.ca, a Web site dedicated to educating Canadian businesses about call tracking technology using local and toll-free Canadian phone numbers. 

Our service coverage also includes all of the United States and the United Kingdom.  Here’s a complete list of our global service coverage. 

Today we introduced another functionality to help marketers increase sales, reduce costs and improve customer loyalty.  

Our call tracking data now integrates with SalesForce CRM to help users understand the entire marketing funnel from first click to phone call. 

With the addition of call tracking data, SalesForce CRM users can view a number of rich data points such as:

• Which marketing sources drive phone calls.
• Which keywords are driving phone calls.
• Last Web page visited before calling.
• Caller’s entire click history before placing the call.
• Caller geo-location.
• Custom data relevant to your needs.

“Call tracking for CRM software is a natural.  It’s really all about providing access to relevant information about customer activity through the entire sales cycle — from marketing source to final sale,” says Bradley Reynolds, chief executive officer for Mongoose. 

For example, Mongoose’s phone call data stream automatically creates and updates leads within SalesForce CRM and conversely, changes in SalesForce CRM are immediately show in Mongoose Metrics’ data. 

We love this statistic: Forty-six percent of local online searchers contacted a business by telephone following their Web research.  It’s from a scientific survey by TMP Directional Marketing and comScore in summer of 2009. 

What does it mean for marketers?  If you solely rely on web contact forms, electronic shopping carts and frequently-asked-questions (FAQ) pages to service customers you’re most likely missing out on a huge slice of business. 

For local marketers — whether you’re doing mobile marketing, managing online directories or running a local service business such as a doctor’s office or auto dealership — connecting with local customers is paramount.  But how do you know who’s calling as a result of your online marketing efforts? 

Call tracking solutions provide the answer.  You can provision anywhere from one to thousands of local phone numbers to place on your Web sites.  When your customers call these numbers, Mongoose tracks their searching behavior from keyword to completed sale.  Yes, it’s true.  You can quickly learn which key words are driving phone calls and then adjust your bidding accordingly. 

You can learn more about provisioning local phone numbers for call tracking by visiting our local coverage page.  Here’s a comprehensive list of available local service numbers across the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.

Today we launched Mongoose Metrics’ White Label aka Private Label Call Tracking product for call tracking resellers who want to gain credibility and increase profits by offering their clients our powerful tool for quantifying the offline impact of online advertising.

This white label call tracking offering features:

• Choice of fully-customizable, branded sub-domain.
• Branded login-in page with logo.
• No visibile reference to Mongoose Metrics.
• Full access for resellers and/or their clients to Mongoose Metrics’ technical support.
• Time investment of less than five minutes for implementation.

Call tracking resellers now have the ability to provide call tracking services with their brand attached as well as structure costs which make sense for their business needs.

Bradley Reynolds, Mongoose Metrics chief executive officer says, “Agencies and resellers who specialize in PPC, organic, e-mail, web analytics or even offline advertising can realize the benefits of adding call tracking to their suite of products to help clients visualize a complete marketing picture that illuminates which marketing efforts are driving phone calls, and ultimately, sales conversions.”

Savvy web analytics practitioners now have another option to accurately and powerfully analyze a complete picture of their online advertising campaigns.  Mongoose Metrics today announced a partnership with Unilytics, a world-leader in web analytics consulting.  Unilytics is known for their prowess in helping clients leverage Google Analytics(tm) and Webtrends(tm) platforms for maximum efficiency and return-on-investment.  The partnership is a win-win for clients of both companies. 

“Our partnership creates an even more powerful tool for marketers who want a full analysis – online and offline – for every form of advertising they buy.  At the most basic, yet perhaps most illustrative level, we can tell you which keywords are driving phone calls,” says Bradley Reynolds, chief executive officer for Mongoose Metrics.  He adds, “Whether you’re spending $600 or six figures each month on advertising, it’s imperative to know everything possible about your return-on-investment.  With Mongoose Metrics’ call tracking technology, advertisers can finally understand who’s clicking, who’s calling, how and why. “

“We believe our customers will see tremendous advantages by integrating Mongoose Metrics into their web analytics products,” says Peder Enhorning, president of Unilytics.  “Measuring campaign conversions is critical and web analytics products do this well, except when visitors instead decide to pick up the phone and call in. Mongoose Metrics neatly fills this void and offers our customers an attractive way to better understand which campaigns are working and which are not.”

Mongoose Metrics and Unilytics have a number of clients in common and the collaboration takes advantage of both companies’ assets to provide more value to customers. 

When it comes to doing business with any telephone service supplier it’s important to know the quality-level of the connections.  The best way to measure for voice quality is with a metric called the Mean Opinion Score (MOS).  At Mongoose Metrics, we use only old-school, toll-quality TDM lines and have a high MOS score of 4.5.  Many VOIP providers don’t reach this level of quality so it’s very important to ask any vendor you engage, “What is the MOS score for your service?”

Here’s an article from About.com which details the elements of the MOS score. 

Mean Opinion Score (MOS) - A Measure Of Voice Quality

By Nadeem Unuth, About.com Guide

What is Mean Opinion Score?

In voice and video communication, quality usually dictates whether the experience is a good or bad one. Besides the qualitative description we hear, like ‘quite good’ or ‘very bad’, there is a numerical method of expressing voice and video quality. It is called Mean Opinion Score (MOS). MOS gives a numerical indication of the perceived quality of the media received after being transmitted and eventually compressed using codecs.

MOS is expressed in one number, from 1 to 5, 1 being the worst and 5 the best. MOS is quite subjective, as it is based figures that result from what is perceived by people during tests. However, there are software applications that measure MOS on networks, as we see below.

The Mean Opinion Score Values

Taken in whole numbers, the numbers are quite easy to grade.

5 - Perfect. Like face-to-face conversation or radio reception.

4 - Fair. Imperfections can be perceived, but sound still clear. This is (supposedly) the range for cell phones.

3 - Annoying.

2 - Very annoying. Nearly impossible to communicate.

1 - Impossible to communicate

The values do not need to be whole numbers. Certain thresholds and limits are often expressed in decimal values from this MOS spectrum. For instance, a value of 4.0 to 4.5 is referred to as toll-quality and causes complete satisfaction. This is the normal value of PSTN and many VoIP services aim at it, often with success. Values dropping below 3.5 are termed unacceptable by many users.

How Are MOS Tests Conducted?

A certain number of people are sat and are made to hear some audio. Each one of them gives a rating from within 1 to 5. Then an artihmetic mean (average) is calculated, giving the Mean Opinion Score. When conducting MOS test, there are certain phrases that are recommended to be used by the ITU-T. They are:

You will have to be very quiet.

There was nothing to be seen.

They worshipped wooden idols.

I want a minute with the inspector.

Did he need any money?

Factors Affecting Mean Opinion Score

MOS can simply be used to compare between VoIP services and providers. But more importantly, they are used to assess the work of codecs, which compress audio and video to save on bandwidth utilization but with a certain amount of drop in quality. MOS tests are then made for codecs in a certain environment.

There are however certain other factors that affect the quality of audio and video transferred, as mentioned in that article. These factors are not supposed to be accounted for in MOS values, so when determining the MOS for a certain codec, service or network, it is important that all the other factors are favorable to the maximum for a good quality, for MOS values are assumed to be obtained under ideal conditions.

Software Automated Mean Opinion Score Tests

Since the manual/human MOS tests are quite subjective and less than productive in many ways, there are nowadays a number of software tools that carry out automated MOS testing in a VoIP deployment. Although they lack the human touch, the good thing with these tests is that they take into account all the network dependency conditions that could influence voice quality. Some examples are AppareNet Voice, Brix VoIP Measurement Suite, NetAlly, PsyVoIP and VQmon/EP.