13

Jan

By Dennis R. Mortensen
16 comments
Tracking Mobile Devices in Yahoo Web Analytics

Tracking mobile activity has become, not just a nice to have feature, but a necessity in any mature Web Analytics tool. You of course know this already. Find below a set of entertaining custom Mobile reports from Yahoo Web Analytics, using dimensions such as.

  • Mobile Device Maker
  • Mobile Device Model
  • Mobile Device Screen size
  • Carrier name

The numbers themselves are rather exciting actually, even though my point is, just to show you some of the Dimensions you can use, when doing your mobile analysis with Yahoo Web Analytics. Enjoy! :-)

Custom Report 1:

ywa-mobile-report-1

Custom Report 2:

ywa-mobile-report-2

Custom Report 3:

ywa-mobile-report-4

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

  • http://www.webanablog.com Andy

    Great info, and I’m glad to see them get mobile in YWA! Thanks for posting!

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Thanks Andy. Just a small appetizer.

    -And while I am at it. What a great post you did on “Omniture SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics, & Yahoo Web Analytics”: http://www.webanablog.com/2010/01/07/omniture-google-yahoo-analytics-comparison/

    Cheers
    d. :-)

  • http://www.rudishumpert.com Rudi Shumpert

    Dennis,

    Great stuff again. I’ll have to add this to my list of more things to dive deeper into with YWA.

    -Rudi

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    I believe you are doing a lot of deep-diving already Rudi! :-)

    d.

  • http://www.userdrivenchange.com Jeff

    This is good basic stuff, that I’ve seen available on other providers such as Coremetrics and Omniture. While this is interesting to know, I still find that mobile tracking is very hard due to some of the limitations of the phones that are out there. I’ve found product tags and add to bag tags and order tags seem to not work properly on many phones due to cookie issues, etc. Have you had any experiences with this?

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hi Jeff,

    I think you are absolutely right (that it’s hard). We have a setup today, with a very large number of handsets and a somewhat large amount of operating systems, and with those two variables combined (we might even choose to add carrier as a variable as well) you get such a large amount of possible setups that you simply can’t test them all.

    So in my experience, I see a very pragmatic approach, which is that folks test on the top X handsets, then leave data collection and reporting to do the remainder of the Q&A. Simply accepting that there will be errors, but as long as I have a real-time analytics / tracking system in place, I’ll catch errors as they arrive a push updates rapidly.

    I am not advocating that to be the gold standard – this is just what I see today. So don’t take it for more than it is.

    Cheers
    d. :-)

  • http://insightr.com James Dutton

    @dennis – very timely. we’re currently planning an iPhone implementation with a client and are debating over whether we can use YWA (as we are for their website) or whether we should go with a more application focussed tool like Flurry. What would be nice would be a simple set of instructions on how to manually create the tracking image request, so our developers can write an application to automate the tracking of mobile apps. Glad to see these dimensions (oops, groups) in place! Would be curious (per Jeff’s comment) on how YWA would handle unique user tracking (cookies or otherwise) in a mobile site / app.

    Cheers, James.

  • http://insightr.com James Dutton

    @dennis – actually I just checked my accounts – I don’t appear to have access to these dimensions. Is this a feature that is in the process of being rolled out, or do I need to enable mobile?

    Cheers, James

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hey James,

    These are custom fields set up by the customer, so it is not yet something that is to be rolled out as a standard dimension (they actually have 20 something mobile specific dimensions that they inflate at runtime – pretty cool actually).

    I’ll try to do a more specific post about mobile shortly.

    cheers
    d. :-)

  • http://www.crystalski.co.uk Simon Rigglesworth

    Come on Dennis, lets have a few of these set up as standard… ;)

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hi Simon,

    I Know, I know..

    d. :-)

  • http://joeyfratantoni.com Joey

    Hey Dennis,

    As an avid campaign tracker this is something I have found very interesting. I use some Google Analytics for my websites and it’s nice to see exactly where the traffic is coming from. Now, with the increase in mobile searches, it will be great to see what users are doing when searching on their phones. Being able to track this activity will add to the precision of my metrics. Marketing on the web is a science and with a tool like this it’s easier to target exactly who is searching for what and from where. Thanks for sharing. Great blog by the way. -Joey Frat

  • http://erstebank.at F.Schirmbrand

    Hi Dennis,

    as we can see the smartphone hype right now…it brings up the demand for knowing what this kind of customers do on our portal. so we also would like this dimensions set up as a standard in ywa. :-)

    maybe you can explain us in a little more detailed manner how the mentioned customer did set up the variables correct for this trackingscreenshots? would be very interesting!

    cheers,
    flo

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hi Flo,

    I think I promised a more detailed mobile (smartphone) post one of these days. Which you just underlined there.. :-)

    Thanks for commenting..

    cheers
    d./

  • Marvin Telona

    That is very interesting, I never used yahoo analytics, this might be the reason to start using them.

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hi Marvin,

    I certainly think so :-)
    d/.