Expand my Community achievements bar.

Join us January 15th for an AMA with Champion Achaia Walton, who will be talking about her article on Event-Based Reporting and Measuring Content Groups!

Mobile Browsers should not be classified as "None" in Browsers Report

Avatar

Level 5

7/28/11

Today the "Browsers" report, classifies mobile devices as "None".

 

Displaying "None" even when a User-Agent is clearly captured, represents a confusing and misleading end-user experience.

 

If anything, this behavior only breeds mistrust of all reported data.

 

At a minimum, the "Browsers" report should behave similar to the "Browsers Type" report by presenting an "Other".

 

None should be reserved for the instances where the user-agent is unavailable, obscure, or otherwise not reasonably classifiable.

29 Comments

Avatar

Level 2

7/29/12

Couldn't agree more - in developing mobile sites that were functioning correctly for iOS / Android standard browsers, non-standard browsers (Firefox, Opera Mobile, Skyfire, Boat) had critical bugs.

 

Without specific numbers we do not know which to focus on, and cannot justify the effort to fix.

Avatar

Level 9

8/9/12

Definitely a much-needed request. You can easily pull Mobile Browser in Google Analytics...

 

In addition, the knowledge base has conflicting reports as to whether this is possible:

The Browsers report KB article says v15 provides mobile browser data but v14 doesn't. However, the truth is, neither does.

The Mobile KB article says mobile browser is inaccessible.

Avatar

Level 2

9/20/12

I also talked with Clientcare about the difference between "Browser" and "Browser Type" report.

That all has to do with the "None" part.

You can correlate the "Browser" Report with "Mobile OS" and so have a complete list, but it isn't possible to do this with the "Browser" Type Report.

 

ClientCare responded: Currently this is working as we expect it to. 

This can be true, but I hope they take this Idea in next Release to make the two reports behave logical and not as strange as currently.

Avatar

Level 9

10/25/12

Our Browser report shows "None" as one of the top browser in many of our report suites. When I break that "None" down by user agent string, I see that almost all of them are mobile browsers. Please update the list of user agent strings used in the Browser report to include mobile browsers.

Avatar

Level 1

10/31/12

I'm behind this.  Tablets and other mobile devices are moving towards becoming the primary computing device for a a significant number of people.

 

As a first step, taking the mobile browser out of the 'None' category is right, but we should also be looking to get more detail from the UA string or similar as well.

Avatar

Level 2

1/20/13

Yes, I have numerous questions from users on this report because of the "none" category. I would be nice to just have it say "mobile."

Avatar

Level 1

2/6/13

As user behavior shifts to mobile, it becomes ever more important to collect Mobile Browser.  SiteCatalyst does not collect Mobile Browser currently, and I would like to see that changed.  Why not collect this data?