Introducing Mobile Site Analyzer!

Posted by Brian Klais

If you’re a smartphone user in 2011, I’m sure you’d agree with me that the mobile consumer web sucks more than it should. Even retail brands that offer mobile-friendly content often frustrate would-be consumers by failing to connect us to this mobile content. (Read about the technical reasons and live examples.)

That’s why I’m so excited today to announce the beta release of our new lab technology called Mobile Site Analyzer!

With Mobile Site Analyzer, retail brands can make their mobile consumer web experience suck a bit less. Improving the experience is critical to helping us smartphoners increase our mobile commerce activity, and for brands to increase mobile ROI. That’s what I call “winning!”

OK – What is Mobile Site Analyzer?

Mobile Site Analyzer is an automated technology we designed to analyze large-scale desktop and mobile website content. In a matter of minutes, Mobile Site Analyzer produces an optimization score for your site based on a sample of up to 100 pages, and identifies specific pages that may be producing a poor mobile experience or hurting mobile conversion rates. We built Mobile Site Analyzer to help you quickly optimize your mobile experience, and increase your mobile marketing ROI. (See sample report of Home Depot here.)

Why Try Mobile Site Analyzer?

More retailers are providing mobile-friendly content to smartphone users than ever. But for shoppers who access these websites through mobile channels like mobile Organic Search, Paid Search, or Social Media, these same sites often fail to auto-sense or forward iPhone, Android, or Blackberry users to device-appropriate content. This poor usability leads to higher campaign bounce rates, lower conversion rates, and poor mobile ROI.

With Mobile Site Analyzer you can easily:

• Identify problematic pages for users of major device-types
• Save time and money manually scanning hundreds of pages
• Quickly deploy appropriate logic and site patches

If improving your mobile experience and ROI isn’t reason enough to try it, the public beta is also free.

How Do I Use Mobile Site Analyzer?

Using Mobile Site Analyzer is as easy as typing a URL! You can submit a site map HTML page, a mobile campaign landing page, or a competitor URL. Mobile Site Analyzer inspects the links on the submitted page, and produces an audit based on content analysis to determine whether each URL serves “optimal” content for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry users. It couldn’t be simpler. Try it!

Once analysis is complete, we email you a link to your findings, including an optimization score, and page detail with links to W3C best practice analysis, broken down by smartphone platform.

Here are a few practical ways to benefit from Mobile Site Analyzer:

• Benchmark Monitoring: Mobile optimization is never complete. Analyze your home page or site map (HTML or XML) for the most representative sample of how well your site connects smartphone users to mobile content. As you make progress, re-run analysis monthly.

• Optimization Prioritization: Submit various product category URLs from your site. Use the linked W3C page level analysis to identify specific optimization actions. Contrast with your mobile conversion metrics to prioritize optimization resources.

• Competitor Differentiation: Competitors with low mobile optimization scores have higher campaign bounce rates. Submit their desktop site map, or category URLs and compare against yours. Promote your superior mobility to differentiate your Organic, PPC, or Display ads and profit from their higher bounce rates.

Bug Notes

Mobile Site Analyzer is still in beta. We plan to continue improving analysis accuracy, speed, and performance. There are a few minor “bugs” to be aware of at this time.

• Mobile Site Analyzer relies on a combination user-agent detection and content analysis logic. If your desktop site is among the few that utilize Javascript or CSS methods to detect and route iPhone, Android, or Blackberry users, our bot may not be able to see clearly what your mobile users see. That means your audit may show lots of pages as “unoptimized” while smartphone users actually are seeing optimal content.

• Our content-parser currently compares desktop and mobile content size. Some brands employ a basic form of auto-sensing that forwards smartphone customers to a mobile homepage, rather than to a mobile-equivalent page. Mobile Site Analyzer currently consider such landing pages “optimized” since the mobile content likely fits our file size logic. However the mobile user may still find that experience to be unoptimized.

• Total processing and production time are typically less than 10 minutes. During periods of high volume, production and delivery may take as long as 60 minutes. Please be patient during business hours.

I invite you to try out Mobile Site Analyzer today! Let us know if you have questions interpreting your analysis, or ideas to make the tool more valuable for you. Contact us to learn how we can convert your findings into a mobile optimization strategy or action plan. The mobile web doesn’t have to suck.

Brian