Before you invest in mobile analytics

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Before you spend anything on mobile analytics, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Session data on mobile is noisier than on the web
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Where it usually goes wrong

Track flows, not screens. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Respect platform privacy rules or you will be removed. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The short version

You do not control the device, the network, or the operating system version, and the design has to accept that. Three things worth confirming about mobile analytics before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Respect platform privacy rules or you will be removed — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.