The population of smart phones, PDAs, and similar technology is booming. The popularity of these technologies is causing an increase in the number of users accessing the Web using their mobile devices. This is creating both new challenges and new opportunities for website owners. When it comes to measurement of these users, basic analytics will not cut it. Mobile users don’t behave the same way that stationary Web users do. And mobile phones do not necessarily work technologically the same way that stationary computers do. Traditional analytics platforms base measurement on Javascript and Cookies. Most mobile devices do not support Java, nor do they store cookies. Therefore, a different type of measurement is necessary. With the demand for additional measurement came the introduction of mobile analytics tools.
Mobile analytics tools are analytics for measuring mobile user behavior. They are designed to track mobile devices instead of stationary Web users. They track visitors to help you improve performance of your mobile presence, to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses, and to monitor goals. You can locate the country of origin in which the users are located, find out who their carriers are, as well as what model and make of phone they are using. This gives you a better understanding of your mobile visitors.
There are many benefits to understanding mobile users. For one, the mobile web is becoming ever more popular. You don’t want your competition to understand the mobile user better than you do. Understanding the differences in behavior between the mobile user and the stationary user can prove very beneficial. The two different users may spend their time on the same site looking for very different things and may behave very differently when on the site. Understanding this behavior is important for mobile marketing.
There are also many challenges to mobile analytics. The most obvious one is that there are a myriad of different carriers, mobile devices, platforms, and support. All of this is mixed with multiple users, making for confusion and variances in data. The fact that users can go from their stationary computer to their phone for Internet access also causes variances in the data. For example, a user may be checking a local Blog, sees a link for a restaurant he wants to go to, then picks up his phone. He types the URL of the restaurant he visited right into the browser on his phone so he can use the map on the site to get to the restaurant. The problem here is that the visit to the site on his phone will not be counted as a referral. It will be counted as a direct visit, which leaves the data inaccurate for analysis.
There are a variety of mobile analytics solutions available to measure mobile Web use. A few of the more popular ones include Bango, Amethon, and Mobilytics. Google Analytics also offers a free option for measurement of the mobile Web. Each mobile analytics package works a little differently. Mobilytics, Google Analytics and Bango all require code to be placed on the pages of your website which is similar to Google Analytics. Amethon, measures using a different technology that allows measurement without log-file analysis or page tagging. Of course all of these solutions come at a cost, with the exception of Google Analytics. However, the benefits of these solutions may outweigh the benefits depending on your needs.
Though there are many challenges and benefits to mobile analytics, it is still a great option for getting a better understanding of mobile users. Like most analytics, it’s not the individual data points that matter. It is the trends. Mobile analytics is still very new and always changing, and E-Power Marketing’s certified professionals work to stay up-to-date on new developments in analytics tools.
