Our tagline is “Your customers are mobile. Are you?” Here’s one way to determine the answer to that question…

Google Analytics makes it very easy to take a peek at whether or not visitors to your website are coming from mobile devices.

When you log into your Google Analytics Dashboard, click on “Visitors” and you will be presented with menu options underneath that include “Mobile”:

Visits From Mobile Devices & Mobile Operating Systems

In the real example below, you can see that there were 63,291 visits from mobile devices to the website over a six-month period.  Over this same period, our example website received a total of 524,000+ visits.  So, traffic from mobile devices was 12%.  This data was gathered from a website that uses no email marketing to drive traffic, but with the growth of mobile email usage, it is likely that the percentage of mobile traffic could have been higher!

Of the 63,000 mobile visits, 40% came from iPhone, and 30% came from Andriod operating systems.  If you add iPod and iPad, the share of Apple-enabled mobile visits was 70%!

Visits Broken Down By Mobile Carrier

Of the 63,000+ visits from mobile devices there was a fairly even split across the major mobile carriers…

Table: Extract Of Traffic By Mobile Carrier

Conclusion

While there are many ways to determine if your users are mobile (ask them through surveys, look at market research, etc.), most businesses have the means to examine mobile website traffic already at their fingertips.

It’s worth mentioning that when you use the Bluetrain Mobile platform, we also make it extremely easy for you to add Google Analytics code right to the mobile version of your site – giving you the ability to refine your mobile marketing analysis!

p.s. In future blog posts we will be highlighting additional ways to use analytics to examine the patterns and preferences of your mobile audience.