This post is about mobile web analytics, and how you can use them to improve your business. When you start analyzing user data, you'll discover that mobile and desktop visitors have important differences.
Analysts measure a number of key metrics such as engagement, pages per session, time spent on site, and conversions across desktop, tablet and mobile device categories in order to gather greater understanding of how users act on specific channels. We've started to notice fundamental differences in the ways that users interact with web content depending on the device they are using.
Crucial to note is that the web on mobile is becoming ever more pervasive, surpassing desktop web traffic in the USA this year. And many developing nations are skipping the desktop altogether and going straight to mobile.
4 Ways to Use Mobile Web Analytics for Your Business
The need for analytics has increased as these figures become ever more core to day to day operations. Marketers now need to invest in mobile to support the entire customer journey. It's time to step away from seeing the mobile phone as a "second screen" and see it for what it is: the most important new resource for marketing.
Not all visitors will purchase goods or services on the mobile web just yet, but you can be darn sure they are researching. Now is the time to align all areas of your business; marketing, commerce, customer success etc. According to numbers reported by IBM after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, mobile shopping soared to about 32 percent of e-commerce traffic over the mega-shopping weekend -- up 45 percent over 2012. Mobile transactions increased by almost 56 percent year-over-year.
Shoppers use their mobile devices very differently depending on the form factor: smartphones are the "browsing device of choice," while tablets drove twice the number of mobile transactions as the smaller gadgets.
Without further comment, here are the top 4 ways to use mobile web analytics to boost business.
1. Identify Problems with Your Mobile Website
New versions of mobile OS are being released regularly, and not everyone uses Android or iOS. It's important to generate reports about your websites usage on mobile devices. Should a piece of your site become incompatible with a new browser or OS, you can know quickly by seeing users drop away. This enables you to react and save those dropped customers as fast as possible.
2. Help Your Customers Engage
Be sure your analytics tool is counting what you need it to. It's easy to see how many mobile app downloads you are getting or how many visitors engage with your site via mobile, but what else should you measure to understand how customers are engaging with your products or services?
It’s a good idea to gather the data that shows where revenues are being generated. Find out what devices are popular, which resolutions you need to cater for most, and optimize your content so it sings on any device. You can measure and track mobile OS, mobile browsers, screen size, resolution, NFC, connectivity level etc. It’s up to you to be creative in how you use this powerful new data.
3. Optimize the Mobile Purchase Experience
Research on mobile devices happens in ‘brick and mortar’ stores, at home and at work. Even though visitors are arriving at mobile sites, they may not be completing the purchase process through the mobile channel. Analytics can allow the measurement of visits, conversions and sales so that the buyer journey can be understood and compared against other verticals. Optimization is the key here.
4. Focus Where Analytics Tell You To
When you know which pieces of your website are performing and which are not, you know where to concentrate your investment and development time. You can choose to improve the bad, or focus on maximizing the performant areas.
Mobile Web Optimization
One of the solutions to any mobile performance problem identified via analytics is to implement server-side website adaptation based on device detection. This approach is also known as Adaptive Delivery or Adaptive Web Design (AWD). The adaptive technique not only improves the user experience on mobile, but also saves on bandwidth which is beneficial for both the users and website owners.