Sunday, January 20, 2013

A Growing Need for Mobile Analyitics


A Growing Need for Mobile Analyitics

Today, more than ever, people around the world are paying exuberant amounts of money for fancy phones, and pricey plans. According to the International Telecommunication Union, from the year 2010 to 2011, mobile broadband subscribers have grown by 20%, and continue to grow today. Right now there are an estimated 6 billion smartphones out there, and according to Donnie McMillan from the Mobile Business Analytics division at SAP, there currently exists more smartphones, than toothbrushes.

Mobile Web Users

So who are these mobile broadband users, and what are they doing on their smartphones? Of course there are many out there using their smartphones for fun and entertainment, but there are also many who use their phones to do business. Industrial employees for companies such as CAT use their phones to access information about their machines while on the job. Employees of Coca-Cola manage their inventory to match the demand for their product. There are many other reasons business people use their phones to access the web, such as answering important emails, buying supplies, and researching information.  Workers want to be in the know at the moment, act now, and deliver results, and mobile broadband has been a huge vehicle in allowing them to achieve this. There are also casual consumers out there using their mobile devices to make purchases for pleasure and luxury items and services. With this explosion in mobile phone popularity, the need for mobile analytics has never been more prevalent.

How Mobile Analytics Can Help Your Firm

Mobile analytics allows companies to monitor the behaviors of the mobile traffic to their websites. Due to the limitations of smartphones and other mobile devices, they access information from the web differently, and there’s a lot of information that isn’t available to a mobile device. In the earlier days of the mobile web, these limitations didn’t allow mobile users of the web to do everything they could do on their desktop, such as make purchases and access their web-based work software.  To mitigate this problem, software companies have begun to track their mobile traffic. Tracking this traffic has allowed companies to observe the habits of their mobile traffic, to determine how they can design their websites to be more mobile-friendly. With websites continually being more mobile-friendly, companies are better equipped to make sales to mobile users to their site.

Mobile Analytics Key Players

W3C has contributed in a big way to the availability of websites to mobile users. Their mission is to ensure that the Web is available on as many different devices as possible. Now, many companies are using mobile-friendly code when creating their site such as WML and HTML5. With all the progress that has been made in website availability to mobile devices, companies are in a better position to use the information they draw from their mobile users, and optimize their websites.

Why Should We Learn More?

Mobile web use has grown immensely over the past few years, and analysts forecast that mobile web use will continue to grow as more of the web becomes better accessible to mobile users. This growth creates opportunity, and obligation for companies to closely monitor mobile web traffic, and cater to the needs of the mobile web user. The same way online companies have analyzed and optimized their websites for desktops over the past decade, optimizing their websites for mobile users, will make them better suited to make more online sales, and get more return visits from mobile users.

Further Information

Some of the information used in this post can be found by following the links below.

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