Creating Mobile Websites with Drupal Part 2

In Part 1 of this series we looked at the Why of building mobile websites.  In Part 2 we'll look at how to analyze your website for mobile traffic. We will use this information in Part 3 to correctly plan and implement the mobile version of our website.

Google Analytics

So how do you know if mobile visitors are even visiting your website, and if so- which pages do they frequent?  Google Analytics (GA) is a good tool for this, and is already installed on many sites.  If not- get the GA Drupal module and install it.  Then sign up for Google Analytics- it's free- add your site, and get the "UA-xxxxxxx" number for that site (it will come with a code snippet they send you- you just need that number).  There is a field for that number in the GA settings page on your site- put it in, save, and ... wait.  It takes at least one day before GA will have any data on your site, and perhaps many more days or weeks (depending on your traffic level) before you have enough data.

Below is a typical Dashboard for GA - this one shows a month of overall traffic for one site:

Good info, but we specifically are looking for info on our mobile visitors. One method of figuring that out is to look at screen resolutions.  You can do this by drilling down into "Visitors Overview >> view report" then "screen resolutions".  Below is a real example

Notice that #5 is "320 x 480" and #6 is "320 x 396" - either mobile devices, or a 1970 greenscreen terminal.  So we are getting maybe 11% of our traffic from mobile devices, which is likely enough to cause us to develop a better mobile version.  If that number was 0.1% then it probably isn't worth the effort.

GA can further break down the mobile traffic by device, if you need to know that.

More importantly is - what pages do mobile visitors read?  Often it is different than desktop users.  GA can tell you that as well, so you can make sure those pages are very mobile friendly.

Ok, so we know we are getting mobile traffic, and on what pages.  In Part 3 we will discuss ways to "mobilizificate" your Drupal site.