A Quick Analytics Tip for Mobile Fact Finding

Mobile internet access is becoming more and more commonplace, as are mobile friendly and mobile optimized websites. However, justifying the investment of creating a mobile website or making an existing website mobile friendly can be difficult for many marketers. Use Google Analytics to show the boss just how much you’re losing to mistreated iPhone’s, Androids and other mobile devices.

“How much mobile traffic does my website get?”

It helps to know how much traffic to your website comes from mobile browsers. Google Analytics features a report that shares traffic data, to include time on website and bounce rate, for mobile devices – it even does some of the hard work for us by comparing the performance of mobile users to your average traffic.

The sample report below shares some mobile use insight on a corporate website with moderate traffic.

Google Analytics Headers Explained

Visits: Number of sessions by users on your website. A session is a series of one or more page views for a single visit, not a view of a single website.

Pages/Visit: An average of the number of pages viewed in each session.

Average Time on Site: The average length of each session.

% New Visits: Of all these sessions, how many are first time users to your website?

Bounce Rate: Percentage of users who leave your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate indicates a poor web experience, and can be caused by poor design, content, layout, or a plethora of problems. For mobile users, it often indicates that the content and design is simply not usable, readable or accessible.

Finding Your Website’s Mobile Traffic

Step 1: From your Google Analytics Dashboard, select Visitors.

Step 2: Select Mobile and choose Mobile Devices

Gleaning from Google Analytics

That’s a lot of data, but what does it all mean?

The Good

In our example from above, we see that nearly 4% of the website’s traffic for this website is from a mobile device.

The Bad

Mobile traffic has a nearly 75% bounce rate.

New visits can be a mixed blessing. While we can read this as a successful drive to the website, coupled with a high bounce, an above average percentage of new mobile visitors indicates a lower rate of visitors returning to your website.

The Conclusion

Mobile traffic trending upwards coupled with the lost opportunities indicated by high bounce rates suggest that mobile should be on this marketer’s short list. Making their website friendlier to mobile browsers or offering a mobile optimized portal could help significantly reduce bounce and increase returning traffic. Go for mobile!

Going Further – Goals and Ecommerce

Mobile Traffic is a default advanced segment for Google Analytics. This allows marketers to view Mobile as a segment in most Google Analytics reports.

Using the Mobile Traffic enables you to see Mobile’s success in your website’s goals and contributions to ecommerce.

Need More?

SilverTech offers support across the digital marketing spectrum, from websites to multichannel tactics to complete, integrated digital strategies. Whether you have a question about analytics, or your brand’s next steps online, we’re here for you. Contact Us or connect with us on Twitter and Facebook.

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Tags: Analytics, Google Analytics, Marc Frechette, mobile, mobile websites

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 25th, 2011 at 9:00 am and is filed under Blog, Guides and White Papers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.