Signs it is time to revisit mobile analytics

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. A few signals that mobile analytics is due some attention.

Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Session data on mobile is noisier than on the web
• Track flows, not screens

How we handle it

Respect platform privacy rules or you will be removed. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What this looks like day to day

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

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.