Mobile Analytics

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.

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.