The mobile web analytics are meant to study the behavior of various mobile web visitors in a way similar to the desktop web analytics. It deals with the data of visitors accessing any web page via their cellphone devices. The various information or data gathered as part of mobile web analytics generally includes the conventional information like page views, visitors, visits, geographical locations. But more specifically it comprises mobile specific information pertaining to cellphone devices like manufacturer, model, screen resolution, the probable ad hoc grouping as per device capacities along with details of mobile network carrier and access through mobile network or any wi-fi network etc.
To collect these details, you cannot go with any traditional web analytics as mobile environment is pretty different from the desktop formats. You certainly need special tools competent enough to work with mobile environments. This is the basic reason why you require mobile web analytics.
Web Analytics Technologies for Mobile Web Analytics – Not a Viable Solution
Collecting various data and information for mobile web analytics cannot be called as a straight forward thing unlike the traditional web analytics. As many of the common data collection methods do not simply work and in many cases, these prove to be an unreliable solution.
If you use any traditional web analytics like Google Analytics, you may end up getting some misleading data which showcases only a small amount of actual mobile traffic. For instance, when you apply any traditional analytics software for your mobile website, you can only find out page views, visits and similar data. This data is based only for some cellphone devices HTTP requests which comes from the latest bunch of mobile browsers often used in Android based phones running apps like flashlight app, and iPhones, PDAs instead of the mass market cellphone devices actually accessing your website via their own cellular mobile network.
Furthermore, the traditional kind of web analytics software which uses the server log parsing and associates a wide range of IP’s are seen failing badly in identifying the unique visitors. The reason behind this failure is due to the fact that the IPs from the mobile network HTTP requests comes out from the Gateway IPs of the network access carriers or providers. For smartphone devices like BlackBerry or any other phone having Opera mini browser software, the IP address is referred to the internet gateway machine in nations like Norway or Canada owned by those brands or companies.
The Other Reasons
The mobile websites can be generally accessed by any network including wi-fi, fixed, satellite wireless, cellular wireless etc. Hence by using any web analytics at such junctures can be grossly inaccurate rather than yielding accurate data. For gathering data for mobile web analytics, you need altogether a different approach and not as conceived by any traditional web analytics meant for any desktop or laptop computers.
The traditional web analytics solutions are not competent in handling mobile specific processing metrics and algorithms. They are not capable enough to extract the mobile specific fields which are required to get accurate data for mobile platforms.
Also, the conventional web analytics simply rely on page tagging approach with the help of JavaScript on different pages on the site.
However, this is not compatible to many of the cellphone devices as they do not support JavaScript. This therefore misses out many of the critical data like keywords and the conversions. Any competent mobile web analytics is developed to yield precise and accurate mobile centric data. They use different approaches including Packet sniffing which comes by installing an additional server known as mobile analytics server into your web platforms.
The web analytics proves notorious as far as accuracy is concerned. The mobile web analytics follows all together a different approach in the cellphone web environment. Hence what you find applicable in normal desktop environment may not be compatible to mobile web platforms. The mobile web is considered a challenging platform; therefore it requires mobile web analytics which does a good job of collecting accurate data.
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