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Track iPhone Visitors to Your Site in Google Analytics

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Track iPhone visitors to your site in Google Analytics.

Ever since Apple released the iPhone, mobile internet browsing has never been the same. With the release of the 3G version, which sold over 1 million units in 3 days, it’s only going to grow faster.

I was a total geek and took off half a day just to buy iPhone 3G the day it came out. 2 stores and 4 hours later, I got it and I’ve been obsessed since. That got me thinking–how many people visit my blog on an iPhone?

How Many iPhone Visitors Do You Have?

Answering this question delves into an infrequently used area of analytics–technographics. Technographics are the nitty-gritty about your visitors:

• What kind of browsers do they use?
• What is their screen resolution?
• What operating systems do they use?

It’s actually a great source of information for your designers and developers. They can make more informed design and code decisions.

To find out how many visits you had from iPhone geeks, you need to look at the operating systems.

1. Open Google Analytics, pick the profile you want and time period
2. Click on “Visitors” in the left nav
3. Choose “Browser Setting”
4. Click “Operating Systems”

You’ll then get a report like this:

Visitors -> Browser Setting -> Operating System

Voila, now you know how many iPhone visits you got. But, what did those people do?

Track iPhone Visits to Your Site with Google Analytics

One of the biggest (and most annoying) issues with Google Analytics is that you can’t easily slice all* the data by different segments of your audience–paid search visitors, email campaign respondents, iPhone visits, etc. Instead, you have to setup a separate profile.

Setting up your iPhone profile in GA takes 3 steps:

1. Add Website Profile and Setup Your Basic Administrative Options
2. Copy Your Goals
3. Setup Filters to Capture only iPhone Visits

1. Add Website Profile and Setup Your Basic Administrative Options

• First, click “Add Website Profiles” under the Website Profiles box (to the left of User Manager)
• Click, “
  Add a Profile for an existing domain”
• Pick your domain and give the profile a name like “iPhone Visits”. Hit finish.

Okay, now you have to setup the usual administrative options like any profile. Click the “Edit” link in the Website Profiles box. Fill out the following fields:

1. Profile Name - Give the profile a descriptive name, like “iPhone Visitors” (clever, no?)
2. Website URL - Make sure this matches your other profile and use the http://
3. Default Page - When you type in your domain, where does it send you? If it goes to a page like “index.html” enter it here. If you don’t, then Google Analytics will report it as a different page than the homepage in your Top Content and Top Content by Title reports.
4. Exclude URL Query Parameters - If you’re site uses parameters to distinguish sessions or the like, you can enter them here and they’ll be stripped from reports.
5. E-commerce Website - If you’re an online retailer, select “Yes” and enter the requested data.
6. Site Search - Decide if you want to track your site search (I recommend you do).

Save your changes!

2. Copy Your Goals

Phew, that’s all done. Now you just have to make sure your goals are lined up so you can track iPhone visitors all the way through conversion.

On the Profile Settings page, pick one of your 4 goals (G1 - G4). Click “Edit” in the settings column. You’re now on the goal settings page, which looks like this:

All you need to do is copy all of the settings from the main profile for your website. Make sure you enter everything the same, including all of the steps in the funnel (if applicable).

Save all of your goals.

3. Setup Filters to Capture only iPhone Visits

Almost there! Now we have to setup a filter. Being a non-coder, I was somewhat intimidated by filters at first, but this one is pretty easy.

Go back to the Profile Settings page. In the Filters Applied to Profile box, click “Add Filter” on the top right. First, add any existing filters you’ve applied to your main profile (such as excluding traffic from your office).

Now, let’s create an iPhone specific filter.

1. Select the radio button marked “Add new Filter for Profile”
2. Filter Name - Name it something that’s easy to identify
3. Filter Type - Choose “Custom” form the drop-down
4. Select the “Include” radio button
5. Filter Field - Select “Visitor Operating System Platform”
6. Filter Pattern - Type “iPhone” just like that without quotes
7. Case Sensitive - No

It should look like this:

Make sure you save the changes.

Wrapping Up

Now you just have to wait a bit for it to populate data, which can take from an hour to a day. If you have an iPhone, now’s a good time to do a test visit to your site, so you’ll have some data in there (if you don’t, leave a link in the comments section and I’ll visit).

Now all you have to do is select the iPhone profile when you login. All of the data you see in that profile–visits, conversion rates, top content–is just for iPhone visitors. Pretty nifty, huh?

PS: If you want to improve how your Wordpress blog appears on iPhones, try this plugin.

*Yes, you can get some data like visits, bounce rate and conversion. However, you can’t get top content, cart/form abandonment, etc.

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