Digital Media Buzz > Mobile Analytics Approach Paradigm Shift

Mobile Analytics Approach Paradigm Shift

By Eric Bishop

Once upon a time, web marketers looking to measure the impact of their mobile presence faced a rocky, challenge-strewn road. The disparities among mobile handsets, the dearth of mobile-tracking web analytics services, the lack of integration between fixed web and mobile analytics: all of these made measuring mobile traffic a major challenge.

Guess what? It’s still a major challenge. But more and more, it’s a challenge worth undertaking.

Consider this: 32 percent of Americans have used mobile phones to access the Internet, according to a recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project of the Pew Research Center. That number is up one-third from December 2007, and it’s only expected to climb as smartphones continue to flood the market. As more users opt for small-screen browsing, assessing your mobile strategy becomes that much more important.

The smartphone proliferation has also made it easier to get a taste of your site’s mobile traffic without having to invest time and resources in separate mobile-specific analytics. Smartphone traffic is easier to track using traditional analytics, of course, because smartphone browsers are much more likely to support cookies and Javascript.

“In early 2008, mobile visitors were largely ignored by the major analytics solutions,” says Bryson Meunier, an associate director of SEO at Resolution Media. “The landscape has changed. Omniture now has a mobile analytics solution, and on Google Analytics, you can simply check a box and see your iPhone visitors.”

With smartphones constituting an ever-larger chunk of total mobile activity, there’s an argument to be made for stopping there — especially if smartphone users constitute your primary target audience. But it’s important to realize that you won’t be seeing the full picture, says Eric Peterson, author of “Web Analytics Demystified.” Relying solely on a solution like Google Analytics has its limitations: “They don’t have device databases, and there’s not a lot of specific information about mobile utility solutions,” Peterson says.

For a simple way to implement a mobile analytics solution with minimum effort, consider PercentMobile, which parses mobile readership by device. Meunier points to Foursquare as a particular example of a company achieving results from PercentMobile. “They saw that most of their traffic from mobile was coming from Blackberry users,” he says. “Blackberry users are not necessarily supported by Google Analytics — you may see them, you may not. But PercentMobile told them that a large percentage was coming from BlackBerry users. This told them that they should implement an app. They saw increased traffic from the app.”

Whether you should drill deeper with a more comprehensive mobile-specific solution depends the importance of non-smartphone traffic to your mobile strategy. But keep this in mind: as the line blurs between the fixed and mobile web in the coming years, the best analytics will be those that can integrate a number of mediums, allowing you to assess the effectiveness of your strategy across platforms.

“In time, all of the traditional web analytics vendors will have mobile-specific reporting, native to their application,” Peterson says. “You’ll be able to do mobile-specific segmentation — segmenting the people who looked at this particular page on an iPhone 3GS, etc. — and I think that’s the way businesses should think about this opportunity.”

Eric Bishop is a Brooklyn-based writer and web producer who recently worked as a nighttime news assistant for NYTimes.com. More of his writing is available at bishopsclips.blogspot.com.