Google Analytics for Mobile is a free set of code that plugs straight into your Android or iOS app and allows you to integrate with Google Analytics. Traditionally Google Analytics was used to track visits to non-mobile websites, but over the past few years Google has extended support across both mobile websites as well as apps. Given that the service is free it’s well worth checking out, as long as you’re happy about giving Google even more information about how people use the internet.

Custom Variables are a feature in Google Analytics that let you add additional information about your visitors when you record what pages they’ve visited or actions they’ve carried out. For example, you can tag whether they’ve paid for your service or not, allowing you to carry out more detailed segmentation to help deliver a better service to your users. Customer variables are a powerful feature, and a welcome addition to the Android SDK. Given Google’s vested interested in moving Android forward, we’ll have to wait and see how long it is before they add this to the iOS version of the SDK. Fingers crossed it’s not long.

The world of mobile continues to expands with Apple and Google leading the way with platforms that support both apps and full support for complex HTML webs sites and web apps within their full featured browser. We’ve come a long way from the world of WAP and XHTML-MP, and the last few years have signalled a step change. Whereas before you might expect your web site or service to target desktop browsers only, now you can expect a large amount of your traffic to come from mobile devices. How much comes from where depends on what services you offer, and your particular type of customer usage patterns, so these days you can’t afford not to have a clear view on what your mobile users are doing.

Whether you offer or build websites that target mobile users, develop iOS or Android apps, or are just interested in mobile statistics, we aim to offer something for you to help your understanding of your mobile users. Welcome aboard, we hope you enjoy the ride.