A COMPANY BEST known for its mobile payments service, Bango , claims to have found the Holy Grail of the mobile internet: a means of counting unique visitors to mobile web sites.

This capability is built into its Bango Analytics version 3.0 product.

Capturing unique visitors hits is more tricky with mobile web surfers than their PC equivalents. For starters, cookies aren’t generally supported by mobile phone browsers or can be lost as soon as the phone is switched off.

Bango carried out a survey of over 550 mobile website owners, and found that 80 per cent wanted to know the dail, weekly or monthly number of unique visitors to their sites.

Data is based around Bango's user ID technology which is created when an individual clicks on an advert or browses a mobile site.

The ID is compiled through sophisticated WAP gateway profiling, data from browser analysis, session information plus network interactions.

The good news is that for smaller sites the service is absolutely free and the price rises to a maximum of £299 ($499) for a site which has five million page views per month.

Those who reckon their mobile site attracts less than 100,000 page visits per month can try it out for free here.