Analyzing the Expanding Mobile Web

January 8th, 2009 Posted in Mobile Commerce

While use of the mobile Web skyrockets, analyzing this complex environment remains difficult. According to comScore, 30 million Americans accessed the mobile Web during January 2007. In comparison, 159 million Americans accessed the Web using a computer that month. Comparing these two figures, we can see that the mobile Web market is already about 19 percent as large as its traditional counterpart.

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Users may still use their computer more often to log on, but one research study projects that the mobile Web market will increase from 76 million units, in 2007, to around 700 million, in 2013.

As browsing capabilities expand and more websites are targeted to the mobile Web, demand for quality analytical approaches and data will increase.

Conventional Web analytics (JavaScript page tagging and log file analysis) miss critical data, so mobile analytics leaders have developed 3 options for tracking mobile website usage.

1. Site Redirection

Web traffic is redirected through a different server, and then back to the mobile Web server. During this process, data is collected.

2. Packet Sniffing

An additional server is installed into the Web environment, and then a switch is used to pass a copy of the incoming packet data to the analytics data. During this passing, data is collected by sniffing the network traffic passing between the server and the outside world.

Because this approach involves no changes to the Web page or servers, the server allows the packets to pass through to the mobile Web server without delay. With packet sniffing, you can gain information on handset resolution and type, browser type, and the mobile operator in addition to basic Web data.

3. Page Tagging

Instead of tagging the page with JavaScript, as in conventional Web analytics, the website itself is tagged with a snippet of code that collects a rich set of data. The type of data collected is similar to what is collected with packet sniffing.

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While mobile Web analytics are imperfect, far more data can be collected than through traditional marketing techniques. Mobile Web developers can use this data to:

  • Understand who uses their content and how

  • Detect problems

  • Improve conversion


cassie

Cassie Wallace

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