Tracking Mobile Searches in Google Analytics

Tracking Mobile Searches

In my last post I was complaining about the fact that you can’t actually see if your mobile customers are coming via search, direct link, or from a referring site. Guess what – I was wrong and I’m man enough to admit my mistake. I did some research and you can see where mobile visitors are coming from and a whole lot of other information about them fairly easily.

Advanced Segments

Google Analytics Advanced Segments On your Google Analytics Dashboard there is a drop down named Advanced Segments. Under here you can choose up to four different advanced segments to break things out by. Mobile is one of them. When you choose mobile or any of the other choices you’ll see all of your reports will feature this breakout. That means that traffic sources will feature a breakout for mobile or non-bounced or searched traffic or whichever advanced segment that you want to break out for all of your reports. You can only choose four of them at a time but you can swap them out on the fly so you don’t need to worry about not being able to see any of the choices they give you if you really want to.

Now that I’m aware of this feature (that has been around since 2008 – oops) when I export analytics data for my customers that want to store it in a database and generate their own reports off of it I can now offer another handful of data sets to them.

Getting Back to Mobile

So this is great stuff but getting back to mobile – I pulled the data for one of the websites I manage and saw that I had a fair number of mobile visitors but that they was a 73% bounce rate. Digging farther I could see almost none of them were coming from search. I immediately dropped an email to this client and told them we need to adjust their online marketing because we are not picking up mobile searches and their target customers are affluent and young.