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.
No comments:
Post a Comment