Optimize And Analyze For Mobile, part 3

This is part 3 of a timely 3 part guest post on mobile analytics strategy and implementation by Feras Alhlou at E-Nor, a Certified Partner in Northern California. Here's part 1, which explained how to look for trends in mobile traffic to your website, and here's part 2 about giving your reports more dollar power.

3. Act on your ROI

At this point, you are equipped with your positive trends and the (hopefully high!) revenue numbers generated on mobile devices. You’ll hopefully get additional time/resources to better assess and improve your mobile presence and mobile marketing initiatives.

But, we still have some more ground to cover, including more segmentation. Let's ratchet up your insights:

More Segmentation.

For your mobile traffic (viewable via an advanced segment or a profile you make specifically for mobile traffic), segment by medium (traffic channel) or campaign (e.g. Back To School Campaign). Take a look at these two metrics:

Bounce rate by medium:

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And conversion rate by medium:

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Do more with Google AdWords.

You notice in the reports above that your cpc (paid-search) traffic from mobile devices is not as prevalent as other mediums. Your results show that your mobile site is experiencing a high bounce rate and a low conversion rate - a good indicator that something is very wrong either on your landing page, or in your ads. Either your ads are not bringing in the right traffic, or you're scaring traffic away.

What you're most likely doing is proving that your site is not optimized for mobile device visits.

Fortunately, you can further back this data up within AdWords. Google AdWords now allows more visibility into campaign performance from different devices. In AdWords, in your Campaign reports, click on ‘Device’ in the Segment drop-down.

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In this situation, in the last cell in the rightmost column, you notice a 0.03% conversion rate for your mobile devices (compared to 0.52% on the non-mobile devices) and you know exactly where the problem is.

To fix the awfulness in the conversion rates, here are a few tips:

• create a separate campaign for your mobile devices
• send traffic to a custom landing page (or to your mobile site if you have one),
• and/or better target the mobile traffic (by device, or using the click-to-call feature).

Last but not least and for tor the technically inclined, and to get a more comprehensive perspective on your mobile presence, take a look at the code site page on mobile. If you're developing for a mobile platform, you can use Google Analytics to track the following:

• Activity on websites specially tailored for low-end mobile devices
• Activity on standard websites accessed from high-end mobile devices
• User engagement with a native iOS or Android application (using the Google Analytics mobile SDK)

In addition, there are a number of new niche analytics solutions specifically built for mobile, so keep on the lookout, and see if a specific tool has a feature that you really need. And, for more analytics tips and insights, follow @ferasa on twitter or check out the E-Nor blog.

Happy Analyzing!

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team and Feras Alhlou, E-Nor