Is your website tracking mobile phone visitors?

I enjoy talking about the topic of web analytics and personally use Google Analytics to track the stats of websites including this one. In my last article I talked about 5 key tips for successfully tracking web analytics on your website and in this article I covered some of the important points that anyone looking to track web analytics on their website should become familiar with and use. One area of growing interest is tracking mobile visitors especially on websites specifically designed for mobile platforms.

Now if you don’t share my passion for stats that is still okay because applications like Google Analytics exist today to help you track and monitor your website without a lot of work needed on your part. In fact, a basic install of the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) is a simple copy and paste into the source code of your website. Could that be any easier?

A lot of people and customers are searching for websites in new and different ways. All I need to do is look at my iPod Touch when I surf the web to realize this. This calls for a way to track people using mobile web browsers and one thing that I love about Google Analytics is all the development that they’ve done to anticipate changes in the web analytics field and market, sometimes before there is a need just so that their users have what is needed to be successful with their web analytics tracking and assistance to make informed business decisions about their web-based businesses.

How easy is it to track sites built for mobile phones with Google Analytics?

This is a pretty cool feature that is going to help you like no one’s business if a large part of your website traffic is coming from mobile phone visitors and let’s face it more and more sites and web applications are being developed for mobile phones these days. So what do you do next? Well, first sign into your Google Analytics account and then follow these steps…

1. Click “Edit” next to the website profile you created to track your website
2. Click on the “Check Status” link on the upper right hand side of the page and scroll to the “Instructions for adding tracking” section
3. Select the “Advanced” portion of the this section
4. Select the “A site built for a mobile phone” radio button option
5. Select the Server Side language that your website uses (There are currently only choices for PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX)
6. Lastly copy and paste this code into your website in the required areas of the website

I am personally hoping and I am sure that the Google Analytics team is going to release more support for other server side languages like RoR (Ruby on Rails), Python, etc. in the near future. They are pretty progressive this way. If you running a website specifically built for mobile phone visitors and you are looking to track your visitors try this out. It might be just what you are looking for in a tracking solution.

Luc Arnold