For the marketer, mobile analytics offers a wide variety of uses related to marketing activities.
Mobile analytics is the study of how mobile users access the Internet and specific websites. This study may cover statistical information such as the number of people using a particular operating system or device. It can also cover behavioral information, such as how much time mobile users spend visiting a website compared to people using a desktop computer.
Mobile analytics can reveal which devices are used to access a website.
For the most part, mobile analytics works the same way as web analytics. It involves tracking the activity of website visitors through website logs, which record every file a user accesses and the time it was accessed. Analytics companies will provide services to individual websites to measure visitor behavior. The largest analytics companies deal with thousands or even millions of customers and take advantage of this by aggregating data from all of their customers. This aggregated data is the source of most reports on the market share gain or loss of certain mobile operating systems.
Compared to standard web analytics, mobile analytics has a specific advantage with location data. A visitor log using desktop computers only provides the general location of each visitor, and depending on your Internet settings, even this may be inaccurate. With some mobile user data, the user’s location can be pinpointed more precisely. This can help website owners better serve the needs of their users. For example, if a price comparison site is heavily used in shopping malls, the site owners might consider redesigning it to be faster to access on the go, or even offer a filtering system that only returns results for stores in a certain shopping center.
Due to the success of mobile apps, not all mobile analytics data comes from websites. Some app developers will collect data from their users. For example, they might collect statistics showing that men ages 18 to 34 spend the most time each day using a specific app. This would make in-app advertising particularly attractive to businesses looking to target this market. This has limitations, as the producers of some mobile operating systems restrict how app developers use this data.