Recently Ad Age Digital published an article discussing the difficulty but importance of mobile measurement — both from a strategic and technical standpoint — asking the questions:

1. What should you measure?
2. How should you do it?

We’ve looked at the percent of users hitting our clients’ sites via mobile devices, and across the board it increases month-over-month. But Ad Age is right — mobile is tricky. Here’s a blog we collaborated on with one of our developers that will get you started on mobile tagging from a technical standpoint. Once you’re comfortable with the “how,” there are lots of ways you can use it to answer business and design questions — but those questions should drive what you choose to measure. For example, you could assess the value of QR codes. You could also use mobile and standard tagging together to inform and then assess the success of mobile site design, as we did last summer for Central Market.

Last summer Central Market partnered with Springbox to assess the likelihood that their community would appreciate a mobile Web presence optimized for quick access on the go. We found then a trend that continued right up until their mobile site launched in late October: the percent of total visits hitting their site via mobile devices steadily increased over the course of 2010 — starting at just 4.67% in January 2010 and nearly doubling to 9.20% in October 2010. We quickly set to work researching what content to feature and for what devices to optimize.

 
To help ensure the success of Central Market’s mobile site, we leveraged data from the standard site’s mobile visitor demographic. Based on the types of devices hitting the main site and the most commonly accessed content, we chose to focus creative development on store locations, hours, specials, pre-made dinner menus, and event info. We also included functionality unique to the mobile Web, including:

• Direct social media sharing via Facebook and Twitter.
• Check-in options through Gowalla, Facebook, and Foursquare.
• Single-button navigation.
• Single-button customer service and catering department calling.

These special features further engage Central Market’s community, while the single-button ordering and navigation functionalities decrease the steps in an otherwise non-e-commerce purchase cycle. We built all this on top of the existing site’s CMS — making the mobile jump and subsequent site updates easy! Central Market can now make key updates to both its mobile and standard sites in one location.

One month after the mobile site launched, we checked back to see how the community responded. We first looked at how often people clicked the “View Full-Site” button, hoping to see it rarely used. Next we looked at the use of the mobile-specific functionalities — the single-button navigation and direct calling options — since they offer a unique experience from the standard site and indicate the strongest intent-to-buy. We found that:

• The “View Full-Site” button was the second-least popular button, accounting for only 1.50% of the site’s total clicks. (Only the “Privacy Policy” button received fewer clicks.) This suggests that most visitors found what they needed on the mobile site.
• Overall, the “Call” button (to general customer service) was most popular, accounting for 31.92% of all clicks on site.
• The “Directions” button, which provides navigation to a selected store, was the second most popular, accounting for 31.21% of total clicks.
• The “Call Catering” button accounted for 4.39%.

Hoping to get the most pertinent information to each user and streamline navigation and calling features, we asked first-time visitors to “Select a Store.” We then set their landing pages to the stores they selected so they would see information for their trafficked stores only. To measure the success of this design feature, we tagged the “Change Store” buttons to see how frequently visitors used them — hoping, as with the “View Full-Site button,” for sparse usage. We found that:

• The “Change Store” button was the site’s third-least popular. Only “Privacy Policy” and “View Full-Site” were clicked fewer times.
• The “Change Store” accounted for only 1.58% of total button clicks on the site.

This mirrors the data related to the content pages. As measured by total site pageviews, people favored time-sensitive, store-specific information: in particular, the weekly specials and nightly dinner-for-two options. Keeping the site tailored to a selected store delivers this customized information more quickly, while informing marketing spend by geographic region and enabling further site optimization opportunities.