One of the purposes of this blog is to educate mobile web site publishers about the differences between mobile and the wired web.

The same way that mobile web sites should not just be “mini” versions of Internet sites, analytics and visitor tracking should be looked at differently as well.

Whether we’re talking about the wired web, or mobile web, there are of course the standard things we all want to know.

• Visits
• Unique Visitors
• Pageviews
• Popular pages
• Referrers
• Search terms
• Bounce rate
• Conversion rate
• and so on…

What’s great about mobile analytics is that we add new segments that we can view the standard data by. We can now analyze visitor behavior not only based on where they are from, when they visit, and how they got there. We can now analyze the behavior based on the phone and it’s features, and how it impacts your conversions.

For example, one thing we struggle with on the mobile web is forms. Let’s say we have a lead generation form that asks for an email address. While filling out that form would be considered a “Goal” with an overall conversion rate, that rate needs to be looked at deeper.

Let’s say overall conversion rate for the lead form is 1.07%

As an analyst, you naturally ask yourself how you can increase that. Well on the wired web, the changes that you make  will affect all visitors in the same way. Every computer has a screen, mouse and keyboard. Other than screen size, we’re not talking much difference.

With mobile analytics, you need to look deeper. The overall conversion rate might be 1.07%, but what is the conversion rate for those visitors that have QWERTY keyboards? So we take a look and we see that number jump to 3.23%!

Well that tells us something, doesn’t  it? If everyone had a QWERTY keyboard, the conversion rate would be much higher. So what can you do? Well that’s up to you. Maybe you break the email address into two text boxes with the “@” between them so users don’t need to find that symbol. Maybe you use one text box, an “@” and a drop down of the most popular domain extensions.

What’s great about analytics, is you can make the change and know quickly if it increases the conversion.

And by the way, what I would do is serve different forms to the users based on the features of their phones., but that’s a whole different post.

So what I’m saying here is that since you are dealing with literally hundreds of screens and keyboards, you need to look at the analytics in context when taking action. Analytics are pointless without taking action.

With mobile analytics, you can now slice the data in new dimensions, and you have new kinds of data to work with.

• What percentage of my visitors support streaming video?
• What is the average screen size of my mobile visitors?
• Which handset owners spend the most per visit?
• How long do smartphone users spend on site compared to smaller flip phones?

All this info is useful in determining what content to serve, and what products to sell. Segmenting by the details of the mobile handsets adds a whole new dimension to analytics.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 10:39 am and is filed under Mobile Analytics, Mobile Web, Web Analytics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.