It has become strikingly apparent that browsing the internet from your mobile device is becoming increasingly more common.  So making sure that your website is mobile friendly and you are leveraging your mobile traffic to the best of your ability, should be of the utmost importance to you. The main question that tends to perplex people is whether or not visitors are trying to find their website from a mobile device?

The best way to establish whether or not visitors are seeking out your website from a mobile device is through your analytical data. Google Analytics is the best free tool in helping you to analyze your website traffic. You can find out how many people are coming to your site from a mobile device and how they are interacting with your site.  As a result you will be able to either confirm or deny your need for a mobile friendly website.

Google Analytics permits you to make advanced custom segments, which allow you to easily determine if visitors are coming to your site from a mobile device. To begin creating an advanced custom segment, click “Advanced Segments” from the “My Customizations” section of your profile and then click “Create New Advanced Segment.”

Follow the 7 easy steps below to create your customize advanced segment and better determine how many visitors are finding you from their mobile device.

1. Drag the `Dimension’ or metric from the left-hand side into the field bordered by dotted lines. (i.e. `Operating Systems’, as seen above)
2. Choose the `Condition’ appropriate to your segment. (i.e. starts with, ends with, greater than.. etc) “Contains” was the value used in our example above.
3. Enter the comparison `Value’ you are using to measure the condition selected. (illustrated above are the names of the operating systems)
4. You can use “and” “or” statements as well to make the segments more comprehensive and limiting.
5. Be sure to click ‘Test Segment.’ to ensure that you chose conditions that make sense and pull data correctly.
6. Name your segment accordingly, and then click ‘Create Segment’ to complete the creation of the segment.
7. Once you have saved the advanced segment, you will be able to apply it through the ‘advanced segments” function in your profile. You will also have the ability to edit the segment at a later date as seen below.

 
Now comes the fun part! You will now be able to determine the quality and quantity of your mobile traffic through your newly created advanced segment and validate the need for creating a mobile friendly website.

Your online marketing campaigns are live and now it is time to determine exactly what users are doing on your site. Search engines like Google have robust reporting capabilities. Other search engine interfaces have limited amounts of reporting and analytic capabilities. These limited reporting interfaces will not efficiently report data in the same way that an analytics platform like Google Analytics will.

Some of the many features Google Analytics has to offer for a first time advertiser user are simple but sufficient data. These includes a visitor’s time your site, how many pages they viewed, and most importantly, how many visitors you are receiving overall especially from online paid marketing efforts.

The amount of time a visitor spends on your site can tell you a lot about the content on your website. Most likely there is something eye-popping that they are viewing. It could be a video or an application on your homepage. This can tell you how long it takes your visitors to view or complete a call to action on the landing page.

Average time on site is important and can tell a marketer if visitors are clicking on their ad listing and then if they are instantly leaving or browsing. Furthermore, if you see that your visitors are viewing multiple pages, they are likely researching and getting for information about your product or service.

Overall site traffic is very important. Regardless, if it is organic, referred, or paid efforts; you want to separate these to see which is performing best for your website. Using Google Analytics to compare your paid traffic to your organic traffic can help you make better budget allocation decisions.

Have you ever done a very specific search, for example “iPhone 3g” and gotten taken somewhere that doesn’t even mention the iPhone? Many advertisers using paid search don’t realize they are not only missing a great opportunity, they could also be losing business to frustrated or impatient visitors.

Picking the right landing page is highly important in paid search advertising. If an advertiser is bidding on product specific keywords and directing traffic to those product pages, they have an opportunity to capture the buyer toward the end of the buying cycle. The visitor knows what they want, has already done the research and should be close to buying. In addition, bidding on more specific keywords will usually be cheaper than general keywords because there is less competition. Eliminate the need for your visitors to do an internal search. Pick a destination page that is relevant to what visitors are searching for and prevent visitors from leaving the site because they do not see what they are looking for.

Using Google Analytics is a great way to get insight into landing pages performance. Businesses can view top landing pages and exit pages. This is valuable because it can show where the best or worst places are to drive traffic on your site.