I want to share with you a brief tip about analyzing web traffic data from mobile devices using Demographic segmentation within Google Analytics.
Recently many of us are pushing and at the same time being pushed to increase spending on Mobile advertising. After all Mobile traffic has increased by over 82% globally and expected to increase by 10 folds by 2018. Pretty wild forecast but let’s trust experts on this one.
One of the ways you can push mobile users to your site is by using Google AdWords. It’s pretty straight forward to do since Google has combined Mobile campaigns with desktop and tablet campaigns. All we need to do is change the mobile bid adjustment and preferably create mobile friendly ads. Instructions for setting this up can be found on Google and plenty of blogs.
Not Always the Best ways to Analyze mobile traffic
So let’s say your like me and your not sure if the product or service your advertising is right for the mobile user. There are few tactics you might be thinking to use:
1. Check Conversions on mobile devices
I’m not the first to this break news: checking mobile conversions can be a very biased approach. Sure there are local services and lower price items that user purchase on their phone, but do you really think consumers will make a big purchase on the run without looking for more details at the comfort of home? Reality is that many mobile visitors can be in the middle or beginning of their purchase cycle and they are not yet ready to commit. Many of them are just seeing what’s out their.
2. Check Click Stream Performance (i.e. Average Duration, Bounce Rate, Page/Visit )
Sure click stream performance matters, but what you will likely find is that click stream performance for mobile traffic will be significantly lower than desktop or tablet performance. The users are more likely on the move and frankly surfing sites on small mobile device is straining on the eyes. It’s good to compare the click stream performance across different advertising channels (organic vs. paid vs. social vs. etc.), but you have to compare mobile data only. So yes click stream data is useful but it does not give you solid insight in to how well mobile is doing overall.
Solution: Segment Demographic Data by mobile vs desktop and tablet
This is just one of the many pluses to using demographics data in Google Analytics and if you haven’t already done so do enable this feature in Analytics.
Once you have demographics enabled and you have a few weeks of data you can proceed with the analysis.
1. Go to the Audience section within Google Analytics and choose Age.
2. Now segment by Mobile Traffic, Tablet and Desktop Traffic, and remove the All Visits segment. You should end up with something like this:
3. Now we are ready to get insight in to the mobile performance. Let’s use the example above and see what insights we can grab.
Insight One
First notice the number of conversions for 65+ age demographics, 11 in this case, which is tied for second highest converting age group.
What’s wrong here but not surprising is that the number of visitors from this segment is only 29! That’s only 1.1% of the 2nd highest converting segment using mobile. What we are doing here is looking at one our most precious segments and seeing how they are not very active with mobile. So when we are paying for ads to target mobile users there is a significant section of our target audience missing.
In reality this is a lesson learned about marketing channels. Advertising with mobile ads is just another type of channel and from what we see here it’s not the most effective channel we should be using to target this segment of 65+. This maybe a very obvious feedback that doesn’t require much more digging but 1)When your setting up pay per click there are so many components that you won’t always think of the obvious. 2) What if it was another age group, how would you explain that? Of course the answer is doing more digging.
Insight Two
Now looking down further at the 45-54 age audience, the mobile visitors are high (relative to other age groups). But notice the extremely high bounce rate of 71.43%! This is alarming because the 45-54 age group seems perform very well on the desktops and tablets but for some reason they are not enjoying the mobile experience.
This is a good takeaway and will require more in depth look to figure out why this age group is performing poorly on mobile. It could be that they have higher expectations than the older age group. They are younger and have seen great site’s on mobile and this site is not up to par.
It can be a number of reasons, but the most important takeaway is that they are a highly valuable audience to us and they are not sticking around while using a mobile device.
See if this method will help you find more insight about mobile traffic performance.
Also if you have any methods for analyzing mobile data traffic or see any interesting insight that I didn’t catch in the example above, please share in the comments.