Mobile Marketing: Mobile Targeting and Tracking. Traditional Web Analytics That Include or Can Be Adapted for Mobile. Google Analytics

Now that mobile Web access has become much more common, you can use traditional Web analytics programs such as Google Analytics and Omniture to see how much mobile traffic is making it to your mobile website. The following is a review of the most popular traditional Web analytics suites that can be used or adapted to track mobile Web visitors.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free analytics platform offered by Google. Different from Google Webmaster Tools, it enables you to track and segment Web traffic in a comprehensive, easy-to-use platform. The tracking is easy to set up because it simply involves including the same piece of tracking code in pages throughout the website. This is easily done by adding the tracking code to the header of the website, if it is consistent throughout the website.

If you subscribe to the Enterprise level of Google analytics, you have access to mobile-specific tracking, and that works on phones that don't support JavaScript. The only additional setup is the insertion of a small snippet of code that sits on the server.

In the nonpremium, free version of Google Analytics, you can easily segment out iPhone traffic from other Web analytics. If you need to track other phones, you can also use Custom Segmentation to show you the browser/operating combinations to drill down to find things such as the following:

•    How much traffic you are getting on specific phones
•    What keywords are driving traffic in mobile searches
•    What your mobile bounce rate is
•    How many page views per visit your mobile site gets
•    What pages are most important to your mobile users

The best option is to set up custom segments for each phone, or each group of phones that you want to track. After segmentation is set up, you can easily move between the results for specific handsets or specific types of phones (see Figure 3.13). (The segmentation rules can get very complicated and, thus, are not included in this example in full.)

 Google Analytics enables you to do custom segmentation so that you can see results for specific handsets or specific types of phones.

To set up segments that will group all mobile phones so that they can be reported on together, you must set up the Advanced Custom Segments. In this dashboard, include all mobile browsers and operating systems. To set up segments for specific phones, you simply need a list of the top handsets so that you can enter the browser/operating system/screen resolution/color-rendering combinations that each phone has and create them as a custom segment. 

The one difficulty with Google Analytics Custom Segmentation is that you cannot set up segments in anticipation of the traffic coming to your website. For instance, if no devices with a 300¥300 screen resolution have ever visited your website, that option will not be available in your custom segmentation options. See Table

You can also set up a segment that works the opposite way, pulling out traditional computers and leaving everything else in. That gives you less specific data but is a quick way to get mobile information without a lot of setup or hassle with the analytics platform. An example of how you might do that is included in Figure, although not all the necessary rules are included.

  You can also use Googie Analytics to pull out data on traditional browsers and operating systems while leaving mobile traffic in.