Mobile Analytics is broken and how to fix it

Posted by & filed under General.

I’ve been seeing this all too often on our geographic places crowd-sourcing app CrowdPOInt. I check Google Analytics and I can’t find traffic generated by my own mobile device and after much enquiry I realise that mobile web analytics (just like desktop web analytics) also relies on the browser being able to load a one pixel (or transparent) image being served by the analytics engine. If the browser doesn’t load this image, then that hit isn’t tracked.

This is a big problem for mobile browsers that have loading of images turned off. The best solution for now is to have your mobile applications directly intervene by triggering the tracking on behalf of the mobile browser.

A better solution would involve requiring the mobile browser to load some other asset like blank css stylesheets or javascript files and performing the tracking on such hits.

  • http://twitter.com/seyitaylor @seyitaylor

    Great post. Lots of things are wrong with the mobile web. I think one of the reasons why they don't get solved is because of the speed at which the rest of the world is moving away from the mobile web as we experience it here. Also, Google analytics can be quite dodgy but I think they've done something for mobile.

  • http://blog.timakinbo.com/ Tim

    @seyitaylor you're right about how the mobile web is somewhat divergent in terms of experiences for both users in the third world vs other advanced countries. This, in my opinion creates an opportunity for local software entrepreneurs to create solutions that work in this market.