Actually I did a study of this a while back using session reconstruction analysis, which doesn't depend on the referer field.
(Jon, if your team isn't familiar with it, I'm happy to talk it through with you (it works and is peer-reviewed!)) While I can't comment on the specific numbers here, the broad pattern we saw was: 1. Mobile sessions produce fewer pageviews and last less time; 2. Mobile users have more sessions, but; 3. Not enough to offset the fewer pageviews. So, the pattern of mobile dropping pageviews is absolutely expected. I'd suggest performing some of this sort of analysis too just so we have a banded box rather than a single datapoint; "approach A produces X outcome, approach B produces Y outcome, so the answer is probably somewhere between the two" is always preferable. Happy to provide assistance with thinking through the analysis here and providing the tools you'd need to do it. On 14 October 2015 at 19:29, Gergo Tisza <[email protected]> wrote: > Yay, data! Thanks for putting this together, Jon. > > On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 10:14 PM, Jon Katz <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> I don't know if we can explain all of our traffic decreases to the drop in >> session length, but it is certainly a big factor. Basically 60% of our >> pageviews (internal) shrink by 33% on mobile. So all else being equal, if >> we transfer all our traffic to mobile we lose 33% of our pageviews. Right >> now we're at 50%. This assumes that there is no change in numbers of >> sessions...on which we have no data right now. > > > We would only lose 20% (33% of 60%). But that is a completely unjustified > assumption. > (Also, there is another unjustified assumption that every mobile user is an > ex-desktop user, ie. that this really is a shift in the habit of an existing > userbase, not Wikipedia becoming less attractive to the old userbase and > attractive to a new one. While it is not strictly relevant to this analysis > whether the user disappearing on desktop and the one appearing on mobile is > the same one, it is very relevant to how we interpret it.) > > We don't have to guess the session numbers, though - your analysis assumes > that non-internal pageviews start a session and internal ones continue it, > in which case the number of sessions is simply the number of non-internal > pageviews. That is, we get > desktop: 510M pageviews / 335M sessions -> 275M pageviews / 175M sessions > mobile: 150M pageviews / 100M sessions -> 230M pageviews / 175M sessions > total: 660M pageviews / 435M sessions -> 505M pageviews / 350M sessions > between the two ends of the graph (numbers are vague; I just looked at the > image and guessed averages). That's a 20% decrease in sessions vs. the 25% > decrease in page views, so it shouldn't cause much change in how worried we > are about the drop. > > _______________________________________________ > Mobile-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l > -- Oliver Keyes Count Logula Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Mobile-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
