Segment Mobile Phone traffic in Google Analytics

Superbowl Sunday! GO NINERS!!!! Is mobile phone traffic on your site going to be the same during the game? During commercials? During halftime? In this post, we’ll show you how to figure that out!

Mobile is taking over! The ability to access the Internet from everywhere is so convenient – when you’re at the supermarket, gas station, even when you’re driving (don’t do that). Sometimes, I’m too lazy even open my laptop at home, it’s simpler to just pull out my mobile phone in front of my TV and connect.

And mobile use is only growing:

• In 2013, more people use mobile than PC’s (Gartner 2011)
• 50% of U.S. cell phone users have smartphones
• 47% of consumers look up local information (for example, stores they want to visit)
• 46% look up prices on a store’s mobile site
• Etc.

(Statistics from rapidmarketplace.com)

Marketers who don’t start accounting for this trend will surely be left behind. The design and structure of your site, how your visitors use it, how visitors buy, etc. – is completely different on mobile devices vs. desktop – even vs. tablets. A mobile visitor is on the go, the screen is significantly smaller than a PC and tablet, it’s touch screen, etc. As a marketer, you need to be able to do dive deep and figure out exactly what’s going on to get insights unique to each.

Ideally, the following insights is what you want to see. You can see in this case that mobile phone and tablet behavior is different – tablet visitors are much more engaged, spend more time on the site, and view an average of one more page than phones:

“Mobile” (including Tablet)

It’s tricky. Google Analytics lumps tablets into the “mobile category”. But what if your design is responsive, and you have a different design for your mobile phone site vs. your tablet site? What if that’s impacting your traffic differently? You’ll need to separate the data.

Advanced Segment: Mobile Phones Only

Google already has a default segment to analyze ONLY “Tablet” traffic. But where’s the “Mobile Phone only” default segment? We love Google, but hint hint, cmon guys…

Have no fear – our resident analyst genius, @charlesfarina created a simple advanced segment to do this. Here’s how:

Step 1. Create a New Custom Advanced Segment
At the dashboard, choose Advanced Segment and click on “New Custom Segment”


Step 2. Name Your Custom Segment
Name it something useful like “Phones”

Step 3. Include Mobile Traffic
Get all of mobile traffic, including Tablets and Mobile by selecting “Include” > “Mobile (including Tablet)” > containing “Yes”.

Step 4. Get rid of Tablet traffic
In order to separate mobile phones from tablets – you want [Mobile (which is mobile + tablets)] – [Tablet]
Add an “and” statement and “Exclude” > “Tablet” > containing “Yes”. This will get rid of tablet traffic.

Your advanced segment should look like this:

You are ready to slice and dice only mobile phone traffic!
Just in case, here’s a quick link for the segment http://goo.gl/TTCEM (so you can just save it to your profile automatically).