So what’s holding back mobile advertising? Online marketing and e-commerce research and consulting firm E-Consultancy has an interesting interview with Chris Smith, the online marketing manager, of Autoglass, one of the UK’s largest vehicle glass replacement companies. Smith decided to take a punt with mobile advertising without the help of an agency and his experiences, (which I suspect are probably very typical at this early stage) of stumbling around and discovering things haphazardly show you what a long way mobile search and display advertising have to go.

Being an online marketing manager, Smith was actually quite intrigued with mobile, and what mobile advertising might do for his company. Last year, he spent £2000 ($4000) knocking up a stripped down mobile (.mobi) site and for the last few months he’s been watching as the traffic trickles in, and how his mobile advertising efforts in both search and display are panning out. As it turns out, the biggest hurdle for him has been his inability to track traffic. Smith:

“...We only really actively started promoting it in April. This was because initially, we had great trouble finding a way of tracking traffic to it. I didn’t want to spend money on advertising if I couldn’t measure the result, and what people were doing on the site.”

Smith also reiterates a complaint about Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Analytics that has surfaced before. “Obviously [it] is not really geared up for mobile as it uses JavaScript, which most mobiles are not geared up to handle. It would tell us we had 100% direct visitors and so on, but it wouldn’t give me any breakdown on where those visitors were coming from. It was obvious it wasn’t really a workable solution for mobile.” Smith eventually resolved the tracking problem by using Bango’s mobile analytics software.

Meanwhile, despite the early hiccups, Smith says he plans to do more with mobile advertising, including doing paid search on Google, to supplement their paid activity on Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO). So is there a difference between mobile and web traffic for Autoglass? Apparently not. Just as on the web, the company gets lots of visitors through display, but the “ones that convert are coming through search.”

• Google Mobile AdWords: Can’t Track Conversions Accurately?