Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

Chapter 14

Mobile Analytics

By Judah Phillips

“Mobile is the next frontier of businesses, and ‘there’s an app for that’ has gone from an advertising catch phrase to an expectation. The Internet boom of the 1990s and early 2000s caught a lot of businesses by surprise. While the quickest profited, there was enough lag in the industry for people to play catch-up. Nobody is going to be surprised by the mobile boom. Make sure you’re not playing catch-up.”

—Author interview with Raj Aggarwal, CEO, Localytics

Mobile analytics, like social analytics, is another form of digital analytics (see Chapter 9). Mobile analytics has much in common with Web analytics, yet it also has a certain uniqueness, peculiarity, nuance, and technology that is specific to “mobile.” Even more confusing is that mobile analytics may also include social analytics. Any portion of the marketing “funnel” can be touched by a mobile device, and any mobile application can touch another digitally enabled application. Thus, while mobile analytics is similar to site (Web) analytics, in terms of data collection, basic concepts, measurement, reporting, and analytical approach, it has complexity, in that mobile analytics must take into account two different constructs of mobile behavior:

1. Mobile sites. These are slimmed HTML (5), WAP, WML, or other Internet-enabled user experiences that can be rendered on any mobile device that does not require a special installation of a “mobile application” for engaging a visitor. For ...