We’re all spending a lot more time thinking about mobile marketing these days, but the statistics that we use to track it aren’t keeping up. It was so easy not so long ago, when mobile phones were the only way to be online while on the go. But so much has changed in the last couple of years that we are now counting many activities as being mobile when they are not, and we are not counting many activities as mobile when they really are. Confused? I’ll be happy to explain.
Our feeble metrics systems need some way of categorizing mobile usage, and what made a lot of sense (the key word here is “made”) is to look at the device that is being used. So, if someone hits a Web site using an iPhone, that is counted as a mobile use of the site. When a computer is used, then it’s not mobile (stationary?).
But that was then and this is now.
Much of our computer usage is mobile, but it doesn’t count as mobile. How many of you have netbooks or laptops with embedded cell network connections? Or how many of you walk around with a portable cell phone Wi-Fi router, like Verizon’s Mi-Fi? Or tether computer access to your cell phone? How many of you use Wi-Fi on planes (or even trains, buses, or cars)? All of that usage is literally mobile, but our metrics systems don’t count it that way, because you were using a computer, which is assumed to be not mobile (fixed?).
And we have the opposite problem, too. If you are using your cell phone to access the Internet at home, is that really mobile? Just because you didn’t want to walk into the next room to look at your computer?
But my favorite dilemma concerns the iPad. Metrics systems typically count all iPad usage as mobile, even though we know that most people don’t even have access to the cell phone networks using their iPad. They are sitting on their living room couches hooked up to their home Wi-Fi, but that counts as mobile.
This struck me when I was told recently that 20% of all visits to a client’s Web site were from mobile devices. This struck me as impossible, because the client offers help for a complex and intimate problem that I didn’t think people would be checking out on their cell phones in public. Now, undoubtedly I was underestimating the number of people doing just that, but I still don’t believe it is 20%. It’s more likely that iPad usage is driving the number up and that people are using their cell phones in their office to avoid Big Brother checking their Internet usage and using them at home so that no one else can see what they are doing. But none of that is what I think about when people say “mobile usage” although now I see that it should be. I don’t know what the answer is here, but we should be thinking about what our assumptions are for what these mobile users want–maybe it makes more sense to divide devices into big screen and small screen than mobile and non-mobile (immobile?).
So, the next time your Web metrics analyst tells you that 20% of your traffic comes from mobile devices, ask him how he knows. And then decide if that number means what it used to mean. I think it doesn’t.
