Mobile is important. Lots of people use mobile. Mobile technologies are closely tied to location and locative media.
It’s easy to get all excited about mobile and the potential it might have for your web presence.
But the truth is, that how people use mobile is different in every market and within markets it can be different even for different segments.
From the data I see, luxury markets perform differently on mobile than plain-old-real-estate does. No surprise really. But the media you consume as a business owner might lead you to believe that all mobile traffic is the same. And growing. And boy you better get yourself a mobile template!
There’s an easy way to deal with this. Just look at your current mobile traffic and figure out what’s going on. Log into Google Analytics and scrub around in the mobile reports and you can figure out quite a bit.
I’m going to take some of the effort out of that task for you though. Try this:
- Log into your Google Analytics (in another browser tab).
- Come back to this page and click this link.
- When prompted, pick the website profile you want to dig in for mobile traffic.
- You now how my simple mobile dashboard. Enjoy!
Gahlord’s simple mobile dashboard
I was tempted to add “for real estate” to the end just to be a smartass. But the dashboard isn’t actually real estate specific and I didn’t want anyone to feel cheated.
The dashboard does have a handful of useful data points in it. Here’s what they are, starting in the upper left.
Are the visits to my site mobile?
This lets you know what percent of visits to your site are mobile. The ones that are “yes” are mobile. This gives you a little bit of context of how much site traffic is coming from a mobile device vs other traffic.
How many mobile visits?
This lets you know how many visits to your site are mobile. There’s also a nice little sparkline chart so you can see how it’s trending.
Which OS are they using?
Here is where you’ll start to learn a little bit about what people are using to access your site from a mobile device. Are you using the same device that most of your mobile visitors are? Not the end of the world if you aren’t, but just remember to check the site on the other devices as well.
I threw in the Bounce rate–the number of people who see just one page–to help you spot devices that may be having exceptionally bad experiences. If one of the bounce rates is way higher than the others consider checking to see if something is broken on the site for that device.
Where are mobile visits coming from?
This lets you know what sites these mobile visitors were on immediately before arriving on your site. Useful for advertising or learning which messaging is working on different platforms.
What do mobile visits search for?
This little table lets you know more about the mobile visits that came from a search engine (like Google). These are the words that mobile visitors are typing into search engines–one of my favorite kinds of reports because it lets you know, in your visitors own words, what they want.
How many times have they been to the site?
Are they loyal? Are they repeat visitors? Or is this the first time they’ve been here? This pie chart lets you know.
What state did mobile visits come from?
This table brings in location a bit. It’s my “for Realtors” table. Though honestly it’s useful to everyone. This gives you a sense of whether you’re looking at local or potential relocation traffic.
Enjoy! Ask questions in the comments. Big shout out to Cyndee Haydon for inspiring me to make this little dashboard.
