“No one visits my site on their mobile phone…do they?”
As a researcher I shouldn’t deal in anecdote but, ignoring that cardinal rule, recent conversations suggest to me that tourism organizations and business are becoming more aware of the potential of people to access their internet sites by phone. However, while they know that this is a forthcoming issue, they remain unconvinced that this is something that they need to worry about just yet.
So, the purpose of this post is to give a primer into how you can tell if people are already accessing your site by mobile devises as well as some of the important issues about how this could develop and what the development of this method of customer’s accessing your site.
Before, I do so, I would like to thank the good folks at the Web Analytics Association for their recent seminar, “Measuring Web 2.0 Technologies Part 2” on which this post is largely based. That seminar is only available for WAA members to access but, if you are not yet a member and you have a serious interest in web analytics, do check the site out anyway.
Anyhow, I thought I would initially structure this post as a question and answer session before moving on to the issue more generally. I suspect that there are a lot of people that need to cover the basics before we look at some of the wider issues.
- Are people already visiting my site by mobile device?
The answer to that is, probably, yes.
- How can I tell?
The way to tell is the way that tell whether anyone has accessed your site: go and look at your web stats.
Specifically, you need to look through your web stats data to see if specific operating systems have been used to access your site.
Now, I am making the assumption here that you have something like Google Analytics or equivalent on your site (if you are the kind of business looking at raw log file data, then this article is probably too advanced or too basic for your needs!). If you are using Google Analytics, choose ‘Visitors/Operating Systems’ and you will get data on how people are accessing your site. The first three entries will probably be Windows, Mac and then Linux but if you go through the whole list, you might find some odd entries and some these will be people accessing your site on mobile devices.
I’ve ringed the entries on the image on the right (click on the image to enlarge) that are evidence (in this single example) of mobile device being used to access a single site.
- Wait a minute, why do you say ‘mobile device’ and not just ‘mobile phone’?
Well, look at the last entry on that list - it’s for a Playstation portable so it’s not just phones we are talking about here.
- How reliable is this information for showing my all the people who came to the site via mobile device?
At present, products like Google Analytics will not pick up visits from most common types of phones. It only really picks up people using ’smartphones.’
- What’s the difference between a smart phone and a normal mobile phone and why does this matter?
A smart phone is the kind of mobile with more advanced capabilities, like Blackberries or iPhones (see here for more details). I don’t have figures but they’re probably the minority of phones used just now but represent what we’ll all be using (in some modified form) soon enough. The reason it matters is that the evidence for website usage you will see will probably be for these sorts of phones.
For the moderately techie among you, this can be explained by the fact that smartphones are often javascript enabled whereas other phones are not and web analytics products like Google Analytics need javascript to be working on your system for their page tags to work.
- Can I track the same customer as they visit my site by phone and web?
Not really. Most solutions will see these as two separate visits and not realize that those two visits are made by the same person. You could get round this by getting people to log on each time they visited but, unless you have a compelling reason to do this, I think it might just be elevating the collection of stats over the user experience.
- OK, so I might have visitors coming to my site by mobile phone - so what?
Put simply, people will use your site differently through a mobile device than through a desk computer. This means that, in order to deliver what they want when they come to your site, you need to be aware of how they are acting in this different environment. For example, page can take longer to download, screens are smaller and some of the programs you take for granted on you computer might not be available on your phone.
So, if you want a site optimised for mobiles the first recommendations would be to look through your stats to see how mobile users are using your site. From this, most other decisions will flow in terms of content. The advice from industry leaders in the WAA seminar was simple enough: Once you see evidence of web usage by mobiles on your site, dig deeper and see what they are doing.
Are mobile users looking for specific content? Certain information may be particularly associated with phone usage - maps, directions, booking references for example - but look at your own web analytics data back up those assumptions. People may be using your site differently by phone. You can also factor in how long are they on the site (bearing in mind a long time does not always indicate a successful experience, but often a frustrating visit).
Some other suggestions I would have include:
- ditch any large graphic files;
- ditch the background music on the entry page (actually, just do this anyway);
- make it easy for the customer to get to where they want to go to - on a mobile, time is money and I don’t want to waste either;
- the mobile experience is more often about ‘just in time’ information rather than gathering a body of research - deliver accordingly;
- is what you are delivering commensurate with the mobile devices capabilities? For example, if you were delivering music samples via your site, you would need to know how big these could be.
- And developing that example: many mobiles do have MP3 players built in as well as cameras - can you take advantage of this somehow?
To round up, I can almost guarantee that the visitors to your website are using a broader range of devices than simply PCs and laptops. They may currently only be a small group - but they may represent a very valuable one. Its worth starting to look for them in your data so you can plan accordingly.
Further reading:Sunday Night Thinking on Mobile Analytics…
This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Business research, Data, Future trends, Internet usage statistics, Online customer behaviour, Research tools. 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.