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Tablet vs Desktop definition

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Level 1

Hi,

I'm looking for the definition of what Adobe considers a tablet vs. desktop or mobile phone. I know some tablets can be quite large, the size of small laptops so I want to know how those are processed into the respective items in the device type dimension.

Thanks,

Garrett

5 Replies

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Community Advisor

I can't find any solid documentation around Adobe's Definitions. These definitions are likely constantly updated to look at new User Agent Strings as they are added, so I suspect that keeping such a document up to date would be a constant job.

 

About the best you could do would be to look at your own data, perhaps doing a Data Warehouse export that pulls Mobile Device Type and Mobile Device Name... If you want to go a step farther, you could even do a Raw Data Feed so you can also see the User Agent String that is being parsed to investigate the pattern of devices...

 

Most of us really haven't dug deeply into this... like any Analytics service (Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, etc) these tools have definitions which closely resemble one another (but there is bound to be slight differences) and we trust that the teams defining these are making the best determinations they can.

 

 

There of course are alternatives if you don't want to use out of the box solutions. If you are concerned about screen size (or rather resolution size), you can create your own eVar to track based on those values.

 

I actually use a combination of Adobe's definition, and what I call our "Responsive Breakpoint". Since our site designs are based on the resolution width of the site, I created a simple code to check the window.innerWidth

 

Sample Data Element:

var breakpoint;
if (window.innerWidth <= X) {
  breakpoint = "mobile";
}
else if (window.innerWidth >= Y) {
  breakpoint = "desktop";
}
else {
  breakpoint = "tablet";
}
return breakpoint;

They are not based on devices, but rather on the "breakpoint experience" that the user sees.... so a user on a Desktop device, that shrinks their window to half screen will likely get the mobile or maybe the tablet experience; users on Android phones in Chrome that use the "View Desktop Site" option in the browser (opening the browser up to use the full resolution of the device) will see the desktop breakpoint....

 

The thing here is that you can add as many breakpoints as you need to represent how your site scales responsively (maybe you have different breakpoints for landscape and portrait tablet mode for instance; and maybe you have another breakpoint for huge monitors, etc).

 

else if (window.innerWidth >= Z && window.innerWidth <= W) {
  breakpoint = "something";
}

This way, while looking at "device type" is nice, I can use a more targeted approach based on what design the site is showing the users instead.

 

Then I can set this in a prop (or eVar) and set it on every use - since the experience a user starts with may not be the experience they stay with (resizing the window, rotating their mobile device, etc)

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Community Advisor

Adobe uses user_agent provided by browser to determine mobile device types. However, the exact mapping is not available publicly. In my experience, the screen size is not a factor to determine the mobile device type at all.

Just one observation that in some newer versions of iPad OS, it is sending a desktop version of user_agent so quite a lot of iPad traffic is now tracked desktop instead of tablet. 

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Community Advisor

Also, with the introduction of Client Hints in Chromium-based browsers, AA has started collecting Client Hints in addition to the user-agent. Reference: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/technotes/client-hints.html?lang=en

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Community Advisor

Thanks to @yuhuisg for the supplement, I just simply forgot this.

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Community Advisor

That's great, I wasn't sure if Adobe was looking at those yet