There is so much buzz of mobile these days, and a lot of promising predictions for the future. But mobile advertising is in need of some monitoring, according to a recent report by Hiloa. The industry, it seems, needs to find better ways of analyzing traffic on the mobile Web and measuring the effectiveness of wireless ad campaigns.

A small audience, coupled with the lack of critical mass of educated advertisers able to measure return on investment, will hold back mobile media’s potential in the midterm, according to a report released by JupiterResearch.

Mobile advertising is destined to be a multi-billion euro industry, said JupiterResearch President David Schatsky. But the maturation of this industry could take a decade. Advertisers tend to be slow to reaction to consumers changing behaviors and will need more than encouraging trials and early click-through rates to begin to invest massively in this nascent medium.

The challenges in mobile are so tangled that even is struggling to compile accurate information. Google AdWords leverages technologies such as JavaScript and cookies that are relatively uncommon in mobile.

Without JavaScript and cookies, the vast majority of conversions resulting from AdWords on mobile devices will go undetected, the London-based search engine marketing agency AccuraCast also noted. This is a serious issue, as it implies that the ROI calculations on many mobile advertisers make for their campaigns will be far from the actual figures. Not only is this a serious problem for Google, who has traditionally bragged about the exceptional accountability and reporting capabilities of its advertising platform, but it is also one that cannot be solved by the search giant.

The inability to accurately measure the effectiveness of mobile ad campaigns was the source of much of the activity at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain last February.

Nokia Corp. made its long-awaited mobile advertising play by introducing Media Network, an alliance of more than 70 publishers and operators including Sprint Nextel Corp., Discovery, Heart and Reuters, the Hiloa article stated. The network, which claims a potential reach of 100 million mobile consumers, leverages analytics technology from Enpocket, a Boston-based startup acquired by Nokia for an undisclosed sum last year.

In addition, five European carriers formed a working group to develop common measurement standards for wireless marketing campaigns. GSM Association members Vodafone Group plc, Telefonica O2 Europe, T-Mobile International and Orange aim to work with advertising industry associations to develop a range of metrics to describe the mobile audience and measure the effectiveness of wireless ads.

Comverse launched a mobile ad solution that comprises an ad server, ad-targeting engine, data collectors and a campaign management component as well as a comprehensive billing and reporting tools.

A lot of others are working to create analytics for mobile ads as well. There is Millennial Media and Third Screen Media, which have built solutions that attempt to build user profiles, monitor consumers behavior and measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns on their advertising platforms. There is also Bango, a UK-based wireless firm that specializes in off-deck activity, which recently joined the field with a hosted service that counts the number of unique visitors to sites and determines the type of phone being used and the language and country of the user.

Millennial has a very good product; they can give you terrific analytics about how their marketing channel works. So can Google, so can AdMob. But what they can’t do is compare that to each other, said Bango’s Anil Malhotra. One of the challenges of the mobile marketplace is that it is fragmented. We actually think that because of the big footprint we’ve got, we’re in a position to become the standard.