While things like daily deals and social networks are creating a new type of inbox, mobile devices and technologies are also shaping the ways in which people digest content. More mobile phone users use their phones to purchase products online, and more retailers are beginning to build mobile sites to enable this. In the US, mobile advertising revenue grew from $304.3 million in 2010 to $701.7 million in 2011, and is furthermore expected to reach $5.8 billion by 2015.
For many mobile web users, especially in developing nations, getting online on their phone is their first and primary exposure to the internet. Here’s some interesting new data showing how mobile use varies between different parts of the world:
Mobile Analytics
If we treat mobile measurement like traditional Web measurement, we face challenges right away, starting with data collection. Many popular Web analytics tools available today – like Omniture and Google Analytics – rely solely 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 information is sent back to the Web analytics tool. That, in a nutshell, is page tagging. Tracking mobile Web in this manner is problematic, though, because mobile browsers do not reliably support JavaScript. Some tag-based Web analytics tools provide a fallback tracking method when JavaScript is not present – namely, a hard-coded 1×1 pixel image request that collects a subset of the standard event-level data. An increasing number of mobile-specific tracking solutions are surfacing on the market, and they offer arguably more robust data collection methods than traditional Web analytics tools.
Mobile Whitepaper
The information above is just a glimpse at the 2012 Mobile Website Usage Whitepaper that InfoTrust has developed. For more tips and statistics on mobile usage, mobile analytics, and mobile optimization, download the whitepaper below.
