Mobile is a brave new world for anyone who’s come from the traditional web analytics world. That’s because current tools designed for PC web analysis from companies such as Google Analytics and Omniture simply don’t work on mobile. That’s because they rely on JavaScript tags for data collection.
Using this method, site owners place a tag on every page they wish to track; when a visitor accesses a tagged page, event-level data is sent back to the web analytics tool. Tracking users in this way is problematic because mobile browsers do not reliably support JavaScript. In fact less than 1% of mobile phones support JavaScript. You wouldn’t believe how many people from the PC world simply don’t believe us!
Other systems use cookies to track visits – on mobile this is unreliable. Apart from some Smartphones, most mobile browsers either doesn’t permit cookies or don’t save them. PC browsers use referral information about where the user came from but on mobile network gateways this is not typically support – it’s only recently that handsets and operators have started to support this and currently it’s proving to be unreliable. The final approach is mapping an IP address to a user but in the mobile world IP addresses map onto an operator’s gateway, not an individual phone.
These problems make the task of analyzing mobile visitors seem insurmountable. Not so if you look at the range of mobile analytic tools available today, including our own – Bango Mobile Analytics.
[...] unique visitor count may be easy to determine for iPhones and BlackBerry devices, it’s much harder for the majority of mobile devices. To overcome the problems inherent in mobile devices - they [...]
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