This release now includes support for MT authentication; previously Bango had supported authentication by use of MO (text a word to a shortcode), but this release builds on that functionality, and adds a lot more to enable seamless authentication flows, regardless of the device, and even if on a non-mobile network connected device (think PC billing!)

As well as our patented word based authentication, we have now added support for a variety of other ways to authenticate your user; be it via a numeric PIN code, a CODE word, or a natural language word. With this in mind, you can also now pass a language-culture parameter, so that a word of “DOG” returned for en-US would be localized to “HUND” for de-DE.

We’re also building support for network discovery from MNC/MCC and IMSI identifiers where available on the device – at the moment this is a work in progress as we’re still mapping these to our internal Bango Network IDs. This is especially useful for In-App Payments, as it allows an up-front discovery check to be made before launching into authentication and payment flows, straight from the handset.

For more info, please go and read the API documentation in our newly launched KnowledgeBase.

Subscriptions can be searched based on User ID, Subscription ID, start date range and mobile phone number. Results include all active and cancelled subscriptions so you can see a complete history for each user.

To access the new page login to your package and go to the Finances tab, then select ‘Subscriptions’ from the left-hand menu.

Please see below the list of the changes.

• We have improved the Email Report functionality to provide download links when a report is too big to be sent as an email attachment – instead, you will receive an email with a link to a download page.

• All standard reports now show you when a report was run. You will find this information on-screen under the summary data, and on the CSV and Excel export reports.

• We have changed the link tracking set up pages to display your renamed parameters.

• We have added a new status filter on the Subscriptions event level report.

• We have added export functionality to the Countries Web Analytics report.

Please send us any feedback you may have. We find it very useful and appreciate you sharing your thoughts.

Here’s a list of the highlights:

• We have made a number of improvements to how the filters operate. We have reduced the amount of traffic generated by the filters and will also now cache filters. Along with other behind-the-scenes changes to filter operation, this should make it quicker to set up and apply filters.
• We have improved the app analytics reports caching as well, so if your app hasn’t sent new data to our system, a report that has been previously run doesn’t need to be refreshed.
• We have added the capability to select up to 5 dimensions in all multi-dimension reports.

• There is now also a new report to show session duration information, providing more insights into how your app is being used.

• We have enabled the extra options for event level exports in PDF format so you can specify the number of rows in the report.
  

And as in every release, we’v included fixes for those annoying little bugs you’ve told us about. Thank you all for your feedback, it helps us find and fix them!

The Bango Development team hopes these new features and improvements will be useful to you and, as always, we really appreciate any feedback you can give us to help us deliver better solutions for you!

More information for reporting

We’ve added more information to the traffic and app events reports. We have added custom parameters to both reports and browser and OS information to the traffic report.

Filter your payment and traffic reports for a specific Bango number

You can now filter your payment and traffic reports by Bango number. The Bango number parameter is optional so if it’s not provided your reports will be unfiltered as before.

Other enhancements

We have added new methods to give you information about the most recent data available for web and app analytics reporting.

You can find the integration guide on our Knowledge base here.

For those who’ve not heard of Payforit before, it’s a scheme developed by the UK networks to provide a consistent standard for making mobile payments, with aim of improving consumer confidence.  It supports interfaces for making one off, subscriptions, and charitable payments.  The basic premise for Payforit is a set of UI and content guidelines which dictate how the payment experience should look and what details should be include.  Below is an example of an old Payforit version 3 payment screen.

And here is the same screen in a Payforit 4 guise, clearly a marked improvement, with a more modern UI, bigger ‘touch friendly’ buttons, better branding opportunities, and an improved footer.

Another notable change between version 3 and version 4 is ‘SMS receipts’. Now all successful transactions  will receive an SMS detailing the transaction and customer care details of the content provider.  The aim is to further increase end user confidence, and potentially reduce fraud / customer care issues in the future.

Payforit Single Click is still fully supported and is a great way to streamline the purchase process and maximize conversions. You can read more about Single click in our knowledgebase.

As a Bango content provider you won’t have to make any adjustments to your site or Bango package. The Payforit 4 styling will be applied automatically.

You can read more about Payforit from here –  http://www.payforit.info.

There are more details available on Wikipedia, but the summary is that more and more web browsers allow a user to set their preferences when accessing sites which may incorporate analytics tracking technology, such as Bango Analytics

Setting the option in, say, Safari, does require a bit of digging, as it is hidden under the “Develop” menu (which can be turned on in the Preferences), but once enabled, any requests to Bango Analytics will be opted out of tracking if the header is passed.

Setting the Do Not Track option in Safari

At the moment, support is available in a number of desktop browsers, and we expect this to further increase on mobile devices, especially iOS and Android.

So, from an integration point of view, you don’t need to make any changes to your site – perhaps apart from communicating this positive change to your users!

Find the highlights here!

Key new features

• New session definition.

We have redesigned the definition of the session in Bango App Analytics. Now you can select a session timeout and make your sessions last for the maximum time you select in your user properties and package properties. It’s now similar to how we calculate the visits length in Web Analytics.

If you liked the old version though, don’t worry: if you don’t set this timeout, the old session definition will be applied.

• Enhanced time period filter.

A new filter by day of week has been added to most of the reports in Bango Management Tools.

Now you can filter all Mondays in your selection, or just exclude specific days to make your data analysis easier. Find it under Visitors & Location in Web Analytics or under Users & Location in App Analytics.

• Free text campaign filtering.

We have added as well a new feature for all the campaign and custom parameters filters. You can now add your own values to the filters. Just type your text and click the “Add” button.

You will see your custom filter values added to the list. This will help you set campaign filters prior to the data collection.

• Live View Report.

We have added a new report in Web Analytics. Under Visitors – Visitors activity you can find the Live View. This report will allow you to graphically compare two days of your choice, being able to show unique visitors, visits or page views figures.

In addition, if one of your selected dates is today, the report will automatically update when new data is available.

Other new features

• Visits filter.

Another new filter: Visits. This will allow you to filter reports by number of visits.

• Filter reports before running.

Lots of filters improvements in this release! Now you don’t need to run a report to be able to filter it. Just add the filters you need after selecting the date range and you will get your report filtered in just one step.

Updates

• No more flash dependency.

We have removed our last flash component: the world map. Now it’s a powerful javascript-based tool that shows you all your analytics data by country.

• Additional email reports options.

New options for email reports set up have been added.

Exclude percentage columns or change your CSV report separator to the one that better fits your needs.

Fixes

Thanks to your useful feedback, we have been able to find and fix some issues. Thank you all for your collaboration!

• Issues where user exports wrong report.

Under specific circumstances there was a chance of the chart being shown in an excel report not matching the data. This has been fixed.

• Issues with funnel setup page.

Some issues with search box and performance in the funnel setup page have been solved.

• Issues with HTML in recorded data.

An issue with CSS styles and HTML code in the campaign or custom parameters values has been fixed.

The Bango Analytics development team hopes you all find these improvements useful. We appreciate any feedback!

New reports
We have added three new reports to web analytics to provide more detail of traffic through your site.

• Recency: This shows the time since your users were last seen on your site. The report uses dynamic date columns – run for one day and view information in hours, run for a month and it switches to day ranges.

  

• Extended Loyalty: This extends the ranges of the standard loyalty report.
• Bots And Spiders: This will provide details on all bot and spider traffic recorded on your website. See details of events generated by computer activity on the internet. Note that this report will ignore your device type filter settings.

The Recency and Extended Loyalty reports can be found under the Visitor Loyalty reports, and the Bots and Spiders report is under Traffic Sources

New dimensions
We have two new dimensions to provide more ways to group your data

• Device Version Dimension (App and Web): This allows you to break down device information even further and find out what versions of devices users are accessing content with.
• Bot name dimension (Web only): This allows you to view details of Bot Traffic recorded on your site.

New Filters
We have also implemented more data filters to allow you to focus on the data you are actually interested in.

• Payment Source: Filter payments by payment source, and find out how each one is performing.

  

• Bot filters: See the types and names of known Bots and Spiders that are visiting your site
• Connection (App only): Filter out certain connections – wifi or operator – from your reports.
• User Id (App only): View reports based on a single user id.

Bug fixes

• 15 minute and Week dimension sorting: We’ve fixed an issue with the sorting of reports using the 15-minute and Week dimensions
• Filters fixed: Some minor filter issues have also been fixed. The derived device filter now orders items in alphabetical order, filters are no longer lost on adding a new dimension and filters are loaded correctly when switching from web to payment reports.

Other enhancements

• More Timezones Added: We have added more timezones to our timezone offsets, to allow you report in exactly the timezone that is relevant to you. These include 15-minute and 30-minute timezones that were previously excluded.
• Averages on summaries: We have added averages to some of the summary report totals. So at a glance, you can now see how many visits were recorded per day without having to calculate this yourself.
• Extra Device Configuration: You are now able to exclude specific device types from your reports at a user or package level. This will allow you to completely filter out device types you do not want within your report data. By default, bots and spiders are excluded from reports.
• Improved Operator Network Detection: We have updated our network information for wireless carriers, to further improve the information we are detecting about user connections

We really hope you find these new features useful and relevant and would like to know what you think about them. Please feel free to leave your comments on this blog.

Android, iOS, BlackBerry Playbook OS, Windows and Mac OSX.

As always, the SDK is now available on Codeplex.

Below are some screenshots of the test application running on various platforms:

Integrating with Bango Application Analytics

To use the Bango Application Analytics SDK in your own application, you will need to first get an application ID. There is a simple form to complete in the Bango Management Tools; in the Setup and Config section, click on ‘Analytics set-up’ in the menu on the left, then click ‘Application analytics’.

All you need to do is give your app a title, this will be used in reporting, and, optionally, choose a category for your app. Once you’ve done this we will provide you with an ID for your app and you can choose an SDK to download.

Please note: the SDKs cannot be integrated into an app without an application ID, you can sign up for a free analytics trial if you want to integrate and try out any of our Application Analytics SDKs.