Ten years ago, the term web analytics was bandied about, but not many people knew exactly what it was, or what it did. Then, as websites became more than brochure-ware, companies wanted to know what kind of return they were getting with the money and effort they were spending.

Enter Google Analytics, a free tool that allowed you to track activities like pageviews, visits, and average time on site. And so people tracked this data, but didn’t do much with it. That lasted until about 2007, when Google Evangelist Avinash Kaushik wrote Web Analytics: An Hour a Day.

He altered the way webmasters and marketing folks looked at web data – namely, changing from tracking it to analyzing it. Actionable insights became a powerful tool for marketing in their arsenal, and the term web analytics is now mainstream, an integral part of web 2.0, or marketing in the digital age.

And now analyzing mobile data is set to take a similar trajectory. Wikipedia states that “mobile analytics studies the behavior of mobile website visitors in a similar way to traditional web analytics. In a commercial context, mobile web analytics refers to the use of data collected as visitors access a website from a mobile phone.”

But what we’re talking about is something more precise, data that provides a deep-dive into actionable insights. Mobile Data Intelligence (MDI) is a strategy for mobile operators and telecom professionals who want to better understand subscriber usage patterns across multiple services. It is also becoming a key ingredient for operators who wish to use this knowledge to maximize marketing ROI, be it to attract new subscribers, convert existing subscribers to new products and services, or retain the overall customer base.

It has never been more imperative for operators to understand the mobile journeys of their subscribers. Data revenues have not kept pace with demand, as there has been a veritable explosion of data caused by the myriad of discounted and legacy data plans offered by mobile operators.

The onus is now on the marketers of the mobile world to find ways to monetize this growth by adapting pricing and targeting their marketing to fit usage patterns.

Mobile Data Intelligence tools gather information on data and device usage patterns so that marketers can get a lot more strategic and focused with their marketing budgets. Simply put, marketers now have access to actionable metrics.

With the level of intelligence these latest tools can apply, marketers can gain insight into fundamental trends, assess changes to known segments, unearth innovative pricing and promotional opportunities, and ultimately develop marketing plans that can significantly narrow the gap between the cost of service delivery and returns.