So here poses the big question. How can mobile analytics help me with mobile SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)? The first key point is to make the site usable on a mobile phone. Due to the limited screen size of a mobile phone and the limited bandwidth, it is important to keep the site compact. Additionally, there should be quick and simple navigation. The mobile templates on the dev.mobi site are a good start.
Back on topic, mobile analytics allow you to identify your users. So lets look at my page’s analytics (using Bango’s analytics, following on from my previous post). Ok, at the moment I’m the only visitor on my iPhone, so I cannot really apply this to site modifications, but Bango’s Analytics allows you to click on any of the devices that have been on your site, and view information about the device. Once I drilled down to the iPhone profile, I could see that the iPhones usable screen width was 320 and height was 360.
This is one of the most important features from an SEO point of view - if you can see that a large proportion of your users are all using the same device, we can modify the page in order to optimise if for the specific screen size. I should also add that the phone profile page also gives information on whether the phone can handle different image, audio and video formats. In addition, it also displays which network protocols it has access to. This is helpful if the majority of your sites visitors are using phones with higher speed networks, you can afford to offer richer content. It’s not an excuse to go crazy on the images though, as there will still be users using slower connections.
If you use individual page tracking, you can drill down to page level (which it titled “Number breakdown”) and view specific data for that page such as:
- Page views
- Unique visitors
- Operators
- Devices
- Countries
Data on most of the pages can also be selected over a period of time which you can set on each 
page (by clicking that little “change” link. You can also select one of four pre-set values which are Today, Day, Week and Month.
October 6th, 2008 by admin
After choosing to go with Bango’s mobile analytics, I went over to their site, and got onto the “Mobile Analytics” page via the link at the top. Then clicking the “Free - Try Bango Analytics” button, I went through the signup process. I feel that I should note that I was actually very impressed by the signup process, it only took about a minute. It’s refreshing to see a site with a short signup process!
Once the account has been automatically setup, you receive an email with your new password in it. 
You click on the link in the email, and then login. Once logged in, you are presented with a welcome page with three options which are “Get page tracking code”, “Add a tracking link” and “Analytics Center” (pictured to the left).
For basic user tracking, you click the first option. The next page explains the process quite well, however I will summarise it briefly here as well. All you just need to do is copy the code on the page into your homepage. You can also track multiple pages if you wish. There is more information on their website regarding this.
Once I had installed the tracking code, I headed over to my little wapsite a few times on my phone, and also once on my PC to check it was all working. Coming back to the analytics page (“Analytics Center”), it was now displaying 3 page views and 2 unique visitors. Which was spot on.
The interface is really friendly, and coming from a predominantly web based background where I was familiar with Google Analytics, it was very easy to use. Below are a few screen shots from the Analytics Center.
October 1st, 2008 by admin
The first thing I did was to decide which mobile analytics solution to go with. My decision was largely influenced by posts on other blogs, and also the possibility of being able to sign up there and then.
The first site I attempted to sign up to was Mobilytics.net, however after clicking the “Signup Now!” button, there was just a message “Mobilytics is currently in beta testing”. Seeing as I did not have an invitation, I moved onto the next site down my list. Number two on the list was Amethon.com. As far as I can tell, Amethon do not provide a hosted analytics solution, instead they rely on installing a piece of hardware on your server. As I do not own my own server, I moved on yet again.
The first site I went to where I was actually able to sign up was Bango.com, I had read up a little on Bango, both on Bryson Meunier’s site, and Bango’s own site. As far as I can tell, at the moment, Bango’s mobile analytics is the only usable solution. I looked at AdMob but their system is designed for tracking their advertising while I just want general tracking so I passed that one by for the time being.
September 3rd, 2008 by admin
Coming from a web based background where I understood analytics and I could use my Google Analytics without a problem was great. This was until I tried to implement my web analytics techniques for a mobile site. To cut a long story short, I ended up with a complete mess where I was getting no data for my little mobile site. After much research, I discovered that it was due to the fact that most mobiles do not support the Google Analytics (JavaScript) tracking code. This therefore means that my Google Analytics tracking code just becomes a waste of space.
During my research, I did find a very good blog post by Bryson Meunier which contained a very concise explanation of the top few companies offering mobile web analytics. Bryson said:
“Yes, you can use Google Analytics or most other popular web analytics packages to track your mobile users. The question is: if you’re serious about bringing in more and better traffic from mobile users, why would you?”
So I asked myself the question, and came to the blindingly obvious conclusion that I am serious about bringing in more and better traffic. Well who wouldn’t? In his post, Bryson outlines some useful information which is well worth a read.
Currently on the scene there are about 4-5 different companies offering different mobile analytics solutions.
- AdMob
- Bango
- Amethon
- GetMobile
- Mobilytics
I will go into more detail about these in a later post.
August 20th, 2008 by admin
