Mobile handsets are believed to have a huge potential as an advertising platform, but the possibilities are yet to be explored, as they remain held up because of the lack of sophisticated and integrated approach to advertising.

In an attempt to address this issue, the GSMA and a syndicate of Telefonica, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile International and 3 have rolled out the findings of a feasibility study probing mobile audience metric in order to let media and advertising agencies, brands and publishers to deliver better mobile advertising campaigns.

The research studying various trends like the number of hours users spend on each site, hours spent by via mobile phones and personal computers, and a sample of anonymous data from UK mobile operators, revealed that operator sites attract the maximum number of visitors, with 68 percent of UK mobile users visiting operator portals.

Google stands as the leading portal destination, while Facebook is the top mobile site, in terms of time spent browsing. Others in the list include yahoo, BBC site, Apple Inc. site, Microsoft Sites, Sony Online, Nokia and AOL sites.

While studying the user behavior in terms of the aggregate time spent on each site per day, it was revealed that mobile users accessing Facebook are found to be spending an average of 24 minutes per day on the site, similar to the 27.5 minutes spent by PC users. Mobile users on Facebook averaged 3.3 visits per day as opposed to 2.3 visits per day by PC users.

Mobile phones are used through out the day, but 7-10 am is observed as the key part of the day for mobile users, comprising of about 22 percent of total mobile minutes browsed, compared with only 11 percent of total minutes browsed by PC Internet users in the same day part. 

Thus, mobile phones can act as an extension to other mediums like internet and TV, as it usurps other early morning media, such as radio and newspapers.

Mobile phones are also seen as a strong youth medium with 48 percent of users between 18-34 years old, compared to 40 per cent for the fixed Internet and 29 per cent for the TV audience. In terms of gender, mobile phones are used more by men, who attribute 63 percent of total users compared with 53 percent for the fixed Internet.

The afore mentioned compilation of aggregated site popularity and user behavior data with independently collected demographic information can enable advertisers to exploit mobile advertisements optimally so as to bring them to their potential heights.