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Also you could look under the Visitors > Operating Systems to get a quick listing to see what the top mobile devices are. However for this option you’ll have to know what the phones are called.
Our list is:
iPhone
BlackBerry
iPod
Samsung
PalmOS
Android
Danger Hiptop
You’ll even be able to get the odd ball fun ones like the Playstation 3 on this report.
After that I’d recommend using an Advanced Segment to create something for like your top 5 mobile devices. This will give you the option to see how their stats compare to the overall stats.
There are positive to both methods (profile/segment) but whatever you do please do something.
Yeah, I discussed that some in the original post. The challenge there is then you REALLY have to keep up with things to make sure your filter is getting all the phones, and you have to keep up with all the new ones coming out, which was just way more work than I’d want to do. My example helps out a little there, by making assumptions about mobile devices. But, that carries it’s own risks. You just have to balance your needs with what produces the most relevant reports for your needs.
I had a thought while I was checking things out on my iPhone this evening.
Are there any non-mobile/handheld devices that use portrait-oriented resolutions? I can’t think of any. Therefore, I would think a good way to capture a good number of mobile/handheld devices (you’d still need other filters to catch the landscape-oriented devices) would be to set up a filter to figure out when the height is greater than the width.
I’d be interested in how you could check for that with regex, nothing comes immediately to mind how you could apply that logic to a filter in Google Analytics. I would caveat you on that though, some people (not many) turn widescreen monitors 90 degrees for portrait mode (I’ve seen authors do this when writing). Likewise, tablet PC’s tend to be used in portrait mode like a sheet of paper. Even some mobile devices report inconsistently whether resolutions are portrait or landscape. But like I said, I’d be interested to see if someone can come up with some filter logic that would work.
Mobile marketing is future marketing online. Thanks for measurement technique.
David
Mobile is the future. I have seen it.
Another way to pull out the mobile data is through an advanced segment. I’ve set one of these up with a series of conditions that filter down to only mobile operating systems (so this is a bit like Paul’s filter).
Disadvantage: you’ll probably be seeing sampled data. For me, this isn’t a huge problem-I want to see trends, I want to see which pages mobile users go to and which they avoid. But a filter might be more accurate. (Accurate in the analytics sense, which means not really accurate, of course.)
Advantages:
1. Filters can only show data starting from the moment you create them. So if you create a filter today, you’ll start seeing data tomorrow, but it will be several weeks before you can start judging any trends. The advanced segment operates on your existing data, so you’ll see data immediately, and you be able to look at past data, too. (I’m not sure if there’s any limit on how far back you can go-I’m able to see mobile traffic all the way back to the launch of our new site in January 2008.) In our case, the data shows that mobile traffic to our site has increased by a factor of 20.
2. You can apply the advanced segment to any existing report or profile. So if you have filters to separate out internal and external traffic, you can then apply the advanced segment to that filter for further analysis.
3. You can compare advanced segments in the same report, which makes it easy to compare, say, all your traffic with the mobile traffic to see what percentage of your total traffic comes from mobile devices.
Any disadvantages I’m missing here? I should set this up as a filter, as well, and compare the data, but in general this approach meets my needs pretty well.
That sounds really useful. I don’t think that phone resolution will ever match notebook resolution though. Every time they decide to make phones better, someone else is going to make noteboooks better as well.
The analytics is not an absolute. There are other tools available to track the parameters. I use my droid to do my searching while on the go. So far i am happy with the new Android platform. The features and apps are evolving.
thanks for information about Mobile Analytics Revisited
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Great posting about mobile analytics Michael, I learned a lot from your posting!