Mobile Analytics

In the past year, I've gotten more interested in analytics for mobile sites and applications. To better understand it, I've looked at a few packages, spoken with a few vendors, listened to several presentations, and listened to several web site owners.

Desktop analytics don't translate well to mobile

Nobody with a mobile site is happy with using Google Analytics.

• Google (and many others) rely on Javascript, which works on a very small percent of phones
• Google (and many others) rely on cookies, which have highly variable support.
• Desktop analytics do not report operators.
• Desktop analytics do not report interaction type.
• Desktop analytics may not distinguish mobile Safari from desktop Safari.
• Google (and many others) do not collect screen sizes in a usable fashion.
• Desktop analytics do no reporting of transcoders, nor do they report users of "keyhole browsers" at their proper screen size.

For example, our site's analytics report that less than 1% of our visitors are mobile browsers, but nearly 8% of our visitors don't have Javascript. If I carefully add up the screen resolutions that look mobile to me, around 2% are mobile. Given the fact that the vast majority of our readers are technically very savvy, and we have a much higher Firefox use rate than the typical site (just shy of 50%), I think that those 8% of non-Java browsers are actually mobile.

So I'm losing around 75% of the information I need.

I think.

Desktop analytics vendors don't understand mobile

Every once in a while, a "full" analytics firm will call and try to sell me on their services for us or our clients. I quiz the sales person, who ends up bringing in somebody from their technical staff (which is actually better than most people who try to sell us stuff). It turns out most vendors don't even realize that the mobiles aren't being picked up in this data. In general it will be safer to go with a mobile specialist.

Free mobile analytics packages are partly there

Mobile ad networks like Bango and Admob have analytical tools built into their platforms. They are there to make ad graphic presentation easier by detecting operator and screen size. But there's no reason these tools can't help you answer questions like "is it time to make a touch version?"

Applications are harder to measure

Most packages don't have easy tools to insert code into your application, and managing impressions versus image downloads may be tricky. If you serve data to an application, think about what you absolutely have to gather, and see what you can divine from customers hitting your server periodically; you won't get click by click data, but you can get a surprising amount of info from it. And definitely look into a source like Flurry to help out.

What should you look to get reported in your analytics package?

1. Operator
2. Device type
3. Device description interaction – be able to run reports based on video support, interaction mechanism, screen size, script support, and more. Not just screen size and browser type.
4. Standard analytics, like connection speed, geographical area, and so forth

Don't give in. Consider little cheats like one-pixel images (called from your server) or other multiple-prong approaches for collecting data.

Good analytics will help you make better decisions about product strategy as well as advertising.

Hi Barbara,

Great article and thanks for the mention. I just want to share an interesting experience a client of ours had.

This company came to us saying that they were getting lots of smartphone users coming to their .mobi site, but no one else. Based on this, they didn’t believe there was any need for a mobile site for non-smartphone users.

With a bit of further investigation, it turned out that the site developers had installed a standard analytics package on the home page of the .mobi site. Since it was based on Java, it blocked any phone that wouldn’t support Java, which is almost all phones except some smartphones. The client actually had many non-smartphone customers, but they just weren’t able to see them!

If you want to see how mobile analytics can be used to analyze real campaigns and analyze sites, go to http://mobislim.wordpress.com.

Thanks,
Sarah Keefe, VP Marketing, Bango

If you are in search of an efficient Mobile Analysts visit www.aditic.com. It’s a great Mobile Advertising website who understands how crucial it is Publishers to follow their revenue flow and also keeps an eye on the money spent in real-time by the Advertisers and Agencies.