Three myths about mobile analytics

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. A few things about mobile analytics that get repeated more often than they get checked.

The version of the app your customers are running is rarely the one you just shipped. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

“It only matters for big sites”

Session data on mobile is noisier than on the web. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

“Our platform handles it”

Respect platform privacy rules or you will be removed. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

In practice

Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. 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.