Last week’s back-to-basics post illustrated the dramatic growth in mobile with an example from googlestore.com. This week, let’s look at how to create a mobile trend graph from your own data.
You’ll start by creating an advanced segment. Go to your reports in Google Analytics. In the left navigation, you’ll see a grey box called My Customizations. In this box, click Advanced Segments. On the next screen, click “Create new custom segment”. This will take you to the segment builder screen.
Under Dimensions (in green), expand Systems and drag “Operating System” into the work area and create this definition:
Operating System Matches Exactly Android
Now, add an OR condition and add another definition:
Operating System Matches Exactly iPhone
Keep adding as many OR conditions and definitions as you like.
Name the segment (for example, “mobile phones”) and save it. You can now use the Advanced Segments dropdown (at top right of most reports) to apply the segment. For last week’s graph, I selected only “mobile phones” and de-selected “All Visits”. This allowed me to only see traffic from the mobile phone types in my segment.
Now, to see your trend graph, go to any report that graphs visits (for example, the Dashboard will work fine for this). Set your date range to include the last 18 months or 2 years. The trend will be most clear if you select the Graph by Month icon (at top right of the graph):
How much growth are you seeing over the past year or more? Post a comment and let us know what you’ve found!
Also, if you’re rusty with advanced segments, be sure to watch this short video tutorial.
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