If you're running a business and have a web presence, then you're probably already using analytics to track what's happening with your web visitors. But how much attention are you paying to the mobile market? As we've shown before, this is an area you can't afford to ignore. With mobile users becoming an even larger segment of the buying public, then using mobile analytics is crucial for any business. Analytics makes your visitor numbers into usable data that can help you with strategy and action.
Mobile Web Analytics
It's important to understand that there are two main types of mobile analytics to be concerned about: mobile web analytics and mobile app analytics. Both provide valuable information to help you understand your business.
Mobile web analytics is similar to the analytics you already use to track what your customers do on your website. The difference is that this type of analytics focuses on mobile device users. This type of analytics covers mobile visitors to your regular site as well as visitors to a mobile version of your site.
An example of this is the mobile section of your Google Analytics report. The basic report gives you an overview of the types of devices people use (desktop, tablet, mobile phone), along with new and returning visits and bounce rate. You can also selectively display other dimensions to get fine detailed on referrals, visitor behavior, social sharing, advertising, conversions and more. There's also more detail on the specific mobile devices that people use when they visit your site so you know if you need to optimize for a particular iPhone model, for example.
Like regular analytics, this type of mobile analytics gives you information on how visitors found your site, what social sites they are using, how they interact with your content, which pages they like best and whether your site is usable (the bounce rate is a good indicator here).
Mobile App Analytics
The other type of mobile analytics is designed to track what's happening with apps. While the number of downloads of your mobile app may be gratifying, it's what happens after the download that matters. In-app analytics can help you figure out how people are using an app and whether any particular experience caused them to uninstall it. Apptamin suggests using Dave McLure's "Pirate Metrics" as a guide: acquisition, activation, retention, referral and revenue. The ability to track conversion funnels, engagement, technical information and more will help you understand whether an app makes sense (either for audience or revenue) and will guide future development.
Advantages of Mobile Analytics
Mobile analytics offer some useful features for businesses, such as the ability to track users by unique IDs instead of cookies. With similar functionality built into Google's Universal Analytics, companies can get a deeper understanding of their customers by analyzing their behavior no matter what device they happen to be using. Mobile analytics can help businesses to:
- figure out which mobile operating systems to target first (why develop an Android app if most of your users have iPhones?)
- ensure that content delivery matches users' needs
- see how mobile contributes to revenue
- target marketing appropriately
- optimize sites for mobile users
Mobile usage is going to increase. That means being able to measure and analyze that for your company is no longer optional, but the price of doing business. Are you ready?
