Google Analytics for Mobile Sites
If you are looking to track Mobile Users for your Website and you have no clue how to do it with Google Analytics or Mobiles analytics. As in my Previous post i had discuss some Analytics tools for Mobile Devices and Craig Hordlow post suggested how to track mobile users using regular expressions.
A new concept for the same purpose, Google Analytics has presented. Now we can track traffic without using filters and creating separate profiles. It’s simple with Google Analytics. You just need to create a new segment through Advanced Segmentation to track number of mobile users on your site.
For this, firstly, setup a custom segment in Google analytics so that we can compare mobile traffic to desktop traffic or smart-phone traffic to mobile traffic.
Here are the steps that you need to follow:
1) Login to your Google Analytics account.
2) Open “Advanced Segmentation” from the left side menu.
3) Click on “Create new custom segment” at the top right.
4) Select “Systems” on the left navigation under Dimensions and
drill down to screen resolution. Drag and drop the screen resolution box into
the box that says dimension or metric.
5) For the condition drop down, select “Matches regular expression” and enter value
(^[1-2]?[0-9]?[0-9]|^3[0-1][0-9]|^320)x([1-3]?[0-9]?[0-9]$|4[0-7][0-9]$|480$).
6) Name the segment ‘Mobile Screen Resolution’ or ‘Mobile Visitors’ or similar as you like.
7) Select Create Segment.
This will help you to create same Mobile screen resolution screen so that you can analyze and see for what mobile users are coming to your website. After this you have option to compare mobile versus desktop users or mobile versus iPhone users, and most importantly you can get mobile specific keyword ideas used by mobile users during searching for your website. More over you can see the conversion rate also, which is very helpful to see the effectiveness of keywords.
However, Let me remind you that Google analytics is traditional analytics and it Mobile Analytics have upper hand on any JavaScript or cookie based analytics for mobile sites. We already discussed the difference between Traditional Analytics and Mobile Analytics.
I tried a small-scale two week test on my homepage of Google analytics and Bango Analytics for desktop website and found that Google Analytics only tracked 12% of the page-views caught by Bango (see below for details).
| Device | Bango Pageviews | GA Pageviews | Percentage |
| Apple iPhone | 18 | 0 | 0% |
| Opera Mini | 8 | 0 | 0% |
| PalmUnclassified | 3 | 0 | 0% |
| Blackberry 9530 | 2 | 0 | 0% |
| HTC P3650 | 2 | 0 | 0% |
| Blackberry 8310 | 2 | 0 | 0% |
| Blackberry 8330 | 1 | 0 | 0% |
| Blackberry 8830 | 1 | 0 | 0% |
| IEMobile | 1 | 0 | 0% |
| iPod Touch | 0 | 5 | 0% |
| Samsung A707 | 1 | 0 | 0% |
| SonyEricsson W200i | 1 | 0 | 0% |
| SonyEricsson W910i | 1 | 0 | 0% |
| Nokia N96-1 | 1 | 0 | 0% |
| Calculation | 42 | 5 | 12% |
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David Johnson
David Johnson is the Co-Editor at SEO-SMO.net.
I usually do not post comments but I just started using twitter and I am a little lost. Thank you for clearing some info for me. Looking forward to your next entry.