Why ‘Tracking Mobile’ Isn’t Enough
For a number of years our team has been specifically monitoring the visitors that view our clients’ websites using mobile devices. With the increased capability and prevalence of smart phones over the last few years, it has become vitally important to keep an eye on the differences in behaviour between visitors using different types of devices, and to ensure that websites and online marketing campaigns are optimised to give everyone a good user experience.
Mobile vs mobile vs mobile…?
More recently it has become evident that looking at ‘mobile vs non-mobile’ is no longer enough to build an accurate picture of how visitors interact with a website. People use their tablets, smartphones, laptops and PC’s all very differently, so a more microscopic analysis is now required.
In response to this, Google analytics has just switched from distinguishing between mobile vs non-mobile to desktop vs mobile vs tablet.
For instance, recent research has shown that different devices are used at different points of an online experience or task. For instance, smart phones are a common starting point for activities such as search, browsing and social networking, whereas tablets are most often a starting point for planning a trip or shopping online. The infographics here show that many of these activities will then be continued on another device, and more complex tasks will eventually be completed on a desktop or laptop.
People are also more likely to use different devices at different times of day. Mobile usage is often observed to be fairly consistent throughout the day, with a slight drop during working hours, whereas tablet usage skyrockets at night.
So what?
All this means that it is now hugely important that websites are designed and built (and have the content) to ensure that a user has the same quality of experience on any device. Can your customers achieve their goals with equal ease on any device? They should be able to.
It also means that any paid online marketing campaigns should be concentrated to serve the right platforms at the right times. With significant changes to the way Google serves paid and non-paid search results over the last couple of years, it is now possible to optimise campaigns to better serve different devices. For ecommerce businesses in particular, this is a very important tool.
And finally, it has becomes even more important to define clearly tracked conversion paths, and to see how these relate to use of different devices. Analysing visitor behaviour is the best way to recognise strengths and weaknesses in your online presence (even better than direct feedback if tracked correctly), and to make improvements.
What next?
Well, if you’re currently not distinguishing between mobile and non-mobile users when looking at your website Analytics, the chances are you’re missing out on a tonne of important data – so start doing it!
And don’t stop there – seek out some advice to help you look at this data at a more granular level and to extract information from this data to help guide your online marketing. It’s crucial already, and it’s only going to get more so.
