While the mobile market itself is very rarely stagnant, the speed at which the social gaming segment has grown of late almost makes the rest of the industry look as if it's standing still.

Despite the obvious benefits, however, this isn't all good news. In the view of Ross Sleight – CSO at mobile marketing agency Somo – so quick has been the market to develop, that developers and advertisers haven't yet worked out the way to best exploit it.

As Sleight suggested during MGF 2012, the art of tracking a user's activities has not yet been pinned down, making repeating any successes they enjoy hard to pull off.

We caught up with Sleight to further delve into the difficulties social studios are encountering right now, and what steps they can take to take advantages of the opportunities the sector presents.

Pocket Gamer: At MGF you spoke of the difficulty in tracking from downloads to installs and monetisation. How much of an issue is that?

Ross Sleight: It's a big issue if you are looking to optimise your cost per acquisition (CPA).

The mobile media landscape is highly fragmented - you have premium placements, semi-blind and blind networks, incentivised activity, direct buys, search and re-targeting at your disposal. Different networks and properties have different emphases and advantages globally.

While many networks can be tracked with their own SDKs, if you are buying across tens, or maybe hundreds of placements and you need to implement different SDKs and optimise hourly, you need to have full control over your tracking and reporting.

This is why Somo developed Apptimiser, our tracking and reporting system that allows us as media planners to optimise our clients’ global media spend on a performance basis.

It could be deduced that, if developers aren't sure who and just why certain users are monetising, replicating any success they have in the future could be difficult. Is that the case?

Ultimately in social games, we are looking for those individuals who will convert to cash and then the percentage of those players who are big spenders.

I ran Virgin Games, the online gambling offering from Virgin, as strategy and marketing director for five years. It’s no different to the online gambling sector. While there is the opportunity to monetise free players through advertising, today, monetisation is all about the virtual currency.

It all comes down to how you judge success. High volume does not necessarily mean success - a game with 10 million downloads but a 1 percent conversion to cash rate could be deemed as successful as a game with 1 million downloads with a 10 percent conversion to cash.

Where these cash converting users come from and how we engage with them through marketing and new products is the key to success. Identifying them and listening to their needs once engaged, and potentially moving them across a portfolio of games is the next challenge.

Where do you think analytics firms are falling short in regards to user tracking?

Existing analytics programmes are fabulous at identifying user journeys in product; we use analytics like Flurry’s across all our bespoke product development and gain amazing insight through event tracking.

This is great for acquisition and ongoing engagement as the analytics is designed to answer these questions.

As a mobile marketing agency we also need to understand the activity prior to acquisition and link this through to engagement to uncover new insights around different channels, creative and strategies.

Right now, no one is addressing these questions in mobile so we have to build our own services which are based on our own unique insight into the optimisation process for mobile marketing.

This is an extension of our existing data analytics and media optimisation teams’ work that is undertaken for our 50 clients across 35 countries.

Is all this an issue for advertisers? Is it likely more would market on mobile if more user data was available?

Yes it is an issue. For the foreseeable future, mobile marketing will be highly fragmented and is developing at such speed that independent expertise is required.

Multiply that across a huge number of territories and mobile buy and optimisation becomes twenty times more complex than search, for example, so advertisers need specialist agencies like Somo to maximise success.

More data and more success stories will always help grow the market, both for brand and performance clients. However there will always be an attention gap with new media.

In the US, 10 percent of adults’ media time is now spent on mobile, versus 7 percent for newspapers and magazines. However newspapers and magazines command 27 percent of advertising revenue. Mobile has 1 percent of all ad spend.

Sure, the mobile advertising market is growing incredibly quickly, but the pace of customer usage is faster, so ad spend levels will always be behind mobile usage. Clever brands see this and exploit the fact that the competition is not capitalising on this huge amount of consumer time.

In light of all this, how successful is Somo's business model?

Incredibly successful.

We find that innovative media planning strategies, consistent data driven optimisation, with robust scalable tracking and reporting solutions are a winning combination across clients in all sectors on a global basis.

Do you see any difference between operating systems?

Yes. Android is always going to be harder to monetise than iPhone in the gaming sector. Partly this is due to the payment methodology - iOS cracked it with iTunes whereas Android is not as smooth, immediate or omnipresent.

It is also due to psychological anchoring - users compare prices across like for like - so a majority of free apps anchor the price at free rather than at a paid level.

Ultimately in-app purchase will become the norm on Android and we are seeing market data that supports this, an area where iOS is already reaping benefits.

We're also incredibly excited about the monetisation of iPad. Because the iPad is a social device in homes, more than one person uses it, so usage is far higher than individual unit penetration.

The retail sector points to iPad being used extensively for shopping; IAB research shows that tablet users spend on average 4.4 hours a week shopping on tablet in comparison to 2.9 hours on desktop and 2.2 hours on smartphone.

At Christmas in the UK, it was reported by Rich Relevance that 97 percent of mcommerce activity was on iOS and 79 percent of that was on iPad. So we are very interested in this platform for scale, reach and conversion.

You suggested at MGF that you'd love to see a mobile dev spend £50,000 or so on securing an ad slot on British TV. Do you think this is a viable option for indies?

What I actually suggested was a full TV campaign for £50,000 - individual ads can be bought for tens or hundreds of pounds, but a distress daytime TV campaign for £50,000 would give excellent reach to women aged 25-55.

We are seeing a fantastic response to TV advertising in direct app downloads, which has an even greater efficacy when mobile advertising is also central to the mix.

This is no surprise when you look at the number of users who have their tablet or phone with them when watching TV – 53 percent of UK and 49 percent of all smartphone owners have them out while watching TV.

It’s about thinking differently and seeking out alternative complementary acquisition channels, something we do at Somo every day to provide the best ROI for our clients.
Thanks to Ross for his time.

You can find out more about Somo on the firm's website.