Category Archives: Web Analytics

Google Chrome User Agent

Google Chrome launched with this user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

Traditional web analytics solutions such as Google Analytics will display Chrome visits under the Firefox section. You’ll need to wait for the future updates of your web analytics solution to identify Chrome visits separately.

If you want to see how many people are using Chrome to visit your site, the best is to look into your server logs.

Mobile Web: Bango Offers a Way to Track Unique Visitors

Since I started doing Mobile SEO about 2 years ago, the main problem that I’ve encountered in my duties was that there’s no way to identify unique visitors when it comes to mobile surfing.

Indeed, as opposed to the desktop Web, where cookies or IP addresses (sometimes combined with user agents for better accuracy) are used to identify unique visitors, it’s another story with the mobile Web. Cookies aren’t supported by all phones and IP addresses aren’t unique to each end user, but it’s the one belonging to the WAP gateway used when you surf from your cell phone.

Today, Bango, a leading provider of mobile billing solutions and also of a mobile analytics suite announced today that it is the first company to provide an accurate unique visitor count.

This may sound surprising, but here’s how Bango explains how it works:

For each individual that clicks on an ad or browses a site, a privacy protected Bango User ID is created, compiled through sophisticated WAP gateway profiling, data from browser analysis, session information and network interactions. This unique user ID enables Bango to distinguish between new and repeat users and therefore quantify precisely the number of unique visitors.

Bango is close to many mobile phone carriers so it managed to work something out with them to profile users. But one thing that I’m not sure of is if this feature works with any carrier…I’ll ask this to Bango when I get a chance.

You can try Bango Analytics here.

AdMob Launches Free Mobile Analytics Solution

AdMob, one of the largest mobile advertising networks, has recently announced the launch of AdMob Analytics, a free mobile web analytics solution.

According to the press release, the main features will be:

“The AdMob Analytics suite allows mobile site owners to track site performance metrics such as unique visitors, duration of visit, page performance, as well as user details including geography, operator and device specifics”

” AdMob Mobile Analytics will also provide site owners visibility into their sources of traffic including search engines, direct traffic and advertising. Combined with the ability to track conversion of the specific events and actions that the campaign seeks to drive, this enables measurement of campaign performance”

I wonder what is AdMob’s definition of “unique visitor”. Unlike on the desktop Internet ecosystem, the mobile Internet doesn’t allow the use of cookies or Javascript on all mobile devices. To my knowledge, the only reliable way to identify unique visitors is by using it’s MSISDN, which is only retrievable by carriers or mobile billing companies such as Bango (which are linked to carriers).

AdMob Analytics is not open to the public yet, you need to request an invite for their beta version on the site.

I cannot say much about the service since I haven’t tested it yet and they aren’t many information on the site. But that’s good to see someone launching a free mobile analytics solution, this will help marketers and mobile site owners get useful information about their visitors, and tune their sites to improve user experiences.

The Web Analytics Metric You’ve All Been Waiting For, Brought to You By Google Analytics

A new feature on Google Analytics was just announced: it allows you to compare your web analytics metrics against other sites’s ones. Here’s what Benchmarking does exactly:

Benchmarking is an optional Google Analytics service that shows how your website’s statistics compare against other industry verticals. In the beta version of this service, you are able to compare your site’s Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and New Visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site so you can identify additional opportunities to improve your site’s metrics.

Of course, this is done anonymously. To be able to use this feature, you need to accept to share yours 🙂 This is explained here.

That kind of metrics will help you measure your efforts, of course it won’t be 100% accurate since they aren’t 2 sites with the exact same profile, but you can adjust your strategy with these data, and see where you are as apposed to your competitors.

Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, by Avinash Kaushik

Avinash Kaushik is probably the best web analytics consultant in the world. His blog provides useful tips and pedagogical case studies to help webmasters and marketers fine tune their web analytics strategy.

Avinash recently published a 480 page book about web analytics called Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, which I immediately ordered on Amazon.

If you’re looking to buy a book to learn or improve your knowledge about web analytics, don’t look further, this book is definitely what you need. And with a price of only $19, there’s no reason for you to hesitate.
Also note that 100% of the proceeds will be donated to two charities: The Smile Train and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).