This is fairly mundane geek talk so if you’re not into this type of stuff, feel free to curse me and then head over to Cute Overload or something.

Anyhoo, during a recent email list discussion (I KNOW! THEY STILL EXIST!!!) at my current job the question came up about developing a multipurpose web presence so that an organization could produce a normal site as well as one geared towards mobile content. A brief discussion ensued and then I asked ‘Have you looked at your logs to see how many hits you’re getting from mobile devices?’. That’s when the ugly truth hit me: Google Analytics takes a little bit of thought to get this information.

My current place of employment does not allow us access to the raw log files in order to perform analysis so many of us rely on a hosted solution such as Google Analytics. The problem with this set up is that when you look at the browser versions browsers like mobile Safari (iPads, iPhones) are indistinguishable from one another. For whatever horrible reason Google Analytics does an absolutely pooptacular job parsing that content from the user-agent string. So what do you do?

Google Analytics requires sites to drop javascript onto their pages so that information could be passed back to the mothership. A wealth of information about your browser and your session is captured, including screen resolution. The trick is to narrow it all down to visitors, browsers and then the screen resolution of that user’s session. BAM. Finally, I can see now that mobile Safari for the iPhone and iPad has wandering across my client’s site(s).

I wonder if I begged loudly if Google could fix this.