Mobile Analytics

According to Nielsen Mobile the adoption of the mobile web has reached a critical mass. Nielsen says that, as of May 2008, 15.6 percent of mobile subscribers in the US make regular use of the mobile Internet on their devices, totaling some 40 million subscribers. This is just a subset of the 95 million US mobile subscribers who pay for access to the mobile Internet (through data plans or some other setup) but don't use it quite so regularly.

Despite such a surge in mobile internet usage business are lacking in measuring the mobile traffic. A recent survey by Omniture found that 71% of businesses are not measuring mobile traffic to their sites. It also found that 50 percent of businesses do not even know how many unique users landing on their sites originate from a mobile device.
Measuring Mobile internet traffic, also called “Mobile Analytics” is not easy, we are still dealing with the accuracy issues with web analytics and now Mobile analytics provides its own set of unique challenges.

Judah Philips in his post on Metrics insider covers a comprehensive list of challenges that Mobile Analytics faces.

Some of the key challenges he lists are

• Data Collection –JavaScript is the most common way of collecting data for web analytics, but not all the mobile browsers execute JavaScript.


• Unique visitor identification - due to lack of cookie support and the changing of IP addresses it is a challenge to uniquely identify a user.


• Traffic source detection - Determining the source of traffic, such as search, email, direct entry, RSS feeds, and marketing campaigns can be challenging in the mobile space.


• Geographic identification - Where are the visitors viewing your site coming from? But not all devices enable geographic detection because the gateway’s IP address is used, not a GPS signal.

Mobile Analytics Solutions

A lot of Mobile Analytics solutions have sprung up in past year or so and more are coming up (See my prediction for 2008). Some of the established web analytics vendors are also now offering Mobile Analytics solutions. These solutions widely differ in their technology, process and capabilities. Which solution will work for you will depend on your needs (In future I might compare some of these vendors on this blog, but meanwhile if you would like help in evaluating a solution you can email me at batraonline at gmail.com). Below is the list of current mobile analytics vendors that I am aware of.

• Admob


• Amethon


• Bango


• Coremetrics


• DeckStats


• mobileStats


• Mobilytics


• Motally


• Nedstat


• Omniture


• Tigtags


• XiTi

Other Resources you might be interested in

• The challenge of mobile analytics - Part 1


• The Challenge of Mobile Web Analytics


• Mobile Analytics: Omniture and Bango


• Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Advertising Revenue to Surpass $2.7 Billion in 2008

Did I miss any tool/solution? Email me at batraonline at gmail.com

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Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra
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Web Analytics Buyer’s Guide, Assessing Vendors’ Competencies and Value

John Lovett from Jupiter Research released his new report titled Web Analytics Buyer’s Guide, Assessing Vendors’ Competencies and Value. In this report he analyzed the web analytics market and various vendors, and concluded:

The Web analytics feature race is largely over and we are left with Web Analytics providers competing on Price and Flexibility.

John provides great analysis and insights in this report but I do not fully agree with his conclusion that feature race is largely over. I believe that as new trends in web continue to emerge so is the need for new features. As Phil Kemelor, another great analyst, writes that audio and video are becoming an important part of the web, so there are clearly features needed to support their tracking. Other features currently missing are for Mobile Analytics. Mobile web is clearly gaining momentum and so is a need for Mobile Analytics. I am sure Product Managers of these tool providers are not ready to quit yet.

I do agree that most of the vendors are mostly competing on Price and Flexibility (post-data-capture segmentation, reporting on custom data elements etc.) at this time. (In my view, flexibility is also a feature though). However competing on price when there is still a lot of room for innovation and differentiation is a very myopic view by current web analytics vendor and will provide a way for someone to disrupt their business very quickly.

Satisfaction with the current tool

One of the surprising results in this report was that more than 69% of the web analytics clients have decided to stay with their current web analytics tool. This is a big change from the trend that we have seen in past. A lot of this has to do with education about web analytics tools, what they can do, how they operate and the fact that several most used features and reports are comparable in various tools.
72% of those 69% where completely satisfied with their current provider.
47% of the customer said that the biggest challenge they were trying to solve with Web Analytics tools was Vistor Segmentation. 47% also said that customer engagement was their biggest challenge.

And the Winner Is?

This report has a great 3 dimensional chart showing how different tool vendors rate in terms of business value, market suitability and breadth of company.
Omniture, Unica, and Coremetrics emerged as industry leaders for large enterprises while WebTrends, Google Analytics, IndexTools and Lyris HQ ClickTracks emerged as industry leader for small-to-midsize businesses along with the three listed for large enterprise customers.

It was surprising to see that WebTrends was not considered an enterprise tool anymore, though WebTrends was the only company to score 100% on availability of basic features. (Sidenote: A customer of ours is replacing Coremetrics and going with WebTrends).
Another surprising result was that Omniture was the overall winner even for small-to-midsize businesses.

You can get the complete report at http://www.jupiterresearch.com/bin/item.pl/research:vision/79/id=100411


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Web Analytics Jobs Trend: Aug 2007

Here is the latest update on “Web Analytics” jobs.
This snapshot was taken on Aug 1st from Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com. Both of these sites are job aggregators that collect open job positions from individual company sites and from job boards such as HotJobs.com. SimplyHired.com also provides job boards called job-a-matic, like the Job Board I have on my blog. These job boards allow individual bloggers or site owners to quickly create a job board specific to their site’s content. Not much has changed from the last month, the jobs remain at the same level as the last month.

Note: Month in the above graph represents the month when the data was gathered.A lot of job positions never are listed on any job board or company sites. These jobs are filled by networking and referrals. So if you are looking for a job and none of the listed jobs meet your passions float your name, let people in your networks and recruiters know what you are looking for and chances are you will find your dream job.


Which tool experience is in demand?
Again, not a big change from last month.

Open Job Positions on indeed.com and simplyhired.com for various web analytics tools.

3 month comparison of open job positions for various web analytics tools based on indeed.com data.

If you want to start a career in web analytics and don't know where to start, check out my article starting a career in Web Analytics and my Web Analyst interview series to see how others got started in web analytics.

Thank you to all of you who promoted and participated in the web analyst job surevy that I conducted last month. I will be publishing the results soon.

This will be the last monthly update on Job trends unless I see a big change. I might switch to quarterly update instead so stay tuned.

Web Analytics Jobs Trend: July 2007

Here is the latest update on “Web Analytics” jobs.
This snapshot was taken on July 1st. from Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com. Both of these sites are job aggregators that collect open job positions from individual company sites and from job boards such as HotJobs.com. SimplyHired.com also provides job boards called job-a-matic, like the Job Board I have on my blog. These job boards allow individual bloggers or site owners to quickly create a job board specific to their site’s content.
Unlike last month, simplyhired.com is now listing more jobs than indeed.com. One likely reason is that all these job-a-matic jobs boards are getting more and more jobs listed on them and these boards are only tracked by simplyhired.


Note Month in the above graph represents the month when the data was gathered.

Indeed.com shows a big downwards trend in open jobs while simplyhired.com shows a slight upward tick. Web Analytics jobs listed on indeed.com are down 21% from last month. On Simplyhired.com open jobs are up 2.64% from last month.
“Web Analytics” jobs listed on indeed.com are up 54.79% from Jan 1st numbers. Since simplyhired now list more open jobs I might switch to reporting baseline with respect to numbers reported by simplyhired. I started tracking jobs listed on simplyhired.com from March onwards. Compared to March “web analytics” jobs listed on SimplyHired.com are up 49.82%.
A lot of job positions never are listed on any job board or company sites. These jobs are filled by networking and referrals. So if you are looking for a job and none of the listed jobs meet your passions float your name, let people in your networks and recruiters know what you are looking for and chances are you will find your dream job.

Which tool experience is in demand?


Open Job Positions on indeed.com and simplyhired.com for various web analytics tools.


3 month comparison of open job positions for various web analytics tools based on indeed.com data.

Key Findings

1. WebTrends and Omniture skills are equally in demand.


2. Open Jobs listed for almost all the tools, except Google Analytics, is down from last month.


3. Last month I wrote that I expected “Google Analytics” jobs to go up considering all the press coverage V2 of Google Analytics got. Voila!! this month’s data proves that I was right with my prediction. Jobs requiring “Google Analytics” skills are up 14% and 19% on indeed.com and simplyhired.com respectively.

I have to admit, I am pleasantly surprised by Google Analytics capabilities. (one day I will write about my experiences with Google Analytics). If you are looking for help with Google Analytics please email me at batraonline at gmail.com.

Want to start a career in web analytics? Check out my article starting a career in Web Analytics and my Web Analyst interview series to see how others got started in web analytics.

I am conducting a survey to understand the salaries offered to Web Analysts (All levels). I will publish the results in future posts. Please take 2 mins to take the Web Analysts Salary survey.

Web Analytics Jobs Trend Update: April 2007

To followup on my predictions here is the latest update on “Web Analytics” jobs.
This snapshot was taken on April 1st.


Starting this month, I chose to include simplyhired.com. They are also a job aggregator site like indeed.com but they also provide job boards called job-a-matic, like the Job Board I have on my blog.
These job boards allow individual bloggers or site owners to quickly create a job board specific to their site’s content. Indeed.com have more jobs listed than simply hired, not sure if indeed.com is aggregating all these jobs on job-a-matic job boards or not.


After dipping about 10.87% in March, open jobs listed on April 1st were up 8.33% on indeed.com and up 20.34% on simply hired. “Web Analytics” jobs listed on indeed.com are up 61% from Jan 1st numbers. It is still a very hot market for “Web Analytics” jobs.

Overall job postings containing “web analytics” as a percentage of all the open jobs positions listed on indeed.com is shown below.



To see which tools are in demand, I did some search on tool related job openings and found the Omniture was in lead closely followed by WebTrends.