Tracking mobile devices in Google Analytics

Google Analytics continues to amaze me with its flexibility and reporting power, and the importance of mobile is definitely not lost on Google Analytics because it has some awesome support for tracking mobile devices…

In this blog we will take a look at three things:

1. Google Analytics ready to go reports for mobile
2. Google Analytics advanced segments for mobile
3. Google Analytics campaign tracking using QR codes for mobile devices

First off it is important to note that the Google Analytics page tag tracking only works on mobile devices if they can handle Javascript. So really we are talking about the iPhone, iPod, iPad, Google Android phones, and newer Blackberry devices (aside: just got the Gingerbread update on my Nexus One, and wow is it slick!).

Read more about mobile internet devices on PublicInsite.com.

Google Analytics ready-to-go reports for mobile

Google Analytics provides a standard report so you can see which mobile devices are coming to your site and in what numbers. The red numbers in the image below indicate the following:

1. How to get to the mobile report from the Google Analytics dashboard – it is under the visitor’s menu item.
2. The trending graph showing the number of online visits is increasing – notice two bumps that occur immediately after Christmas – If I received a new mobile device at Christmas, I would be eager to test it out too!
3. This area shows how mobile visitors compare to all other visitors online for this particular website. (left to right) We see that mobile accounts for 1.3% of all online visits for this time period. We see that mobile visitors tend to spend more time on the site, but look at fewer pages. We also see that there appear to be a slightly higher percentage of repeat visits, and a slightly lower bounce rate.
4. Here we see a breakdown of the different types of mobile devices – and notice that we can compare the average time on site and bounce rate for each device. Notice how iPad users tend to have fewer one page visits (called a ‘bounce’), and that they tend to view substantially more pages than most other mobile devices – perhaps surfing the site is substantially less ‘painful’ when using a larger screen… hmmmm….

Read more about tracking mobile devices in Google Analytics.