Five mistakes teams make with mobile analytics

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit mobile analytics.

Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Common failure modes

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Session data on mobile is noisier than on the web
• Track flows, not screens
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Respect platform privacy rules or you will be removed. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What to do next

In practice

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
• Session data on mobile is noisier than on the web — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.