Question

For the past 10 days we have been getting about 800 visit/day which Google reports as
“Mozilla Compatible Agent / iPhone.”

After doing some reading people seem to suggest that this is when people bookmark your website using a shortcut. Whatever it is, its completely untargeted visits and is causing our stats to be messed up. Bounce rate is 98% and page views are 1.1 from these visits.

I have isolated the ‘bad’ user agents as follows:

**Bad:**
Mozilla/5.0+(iPhone;+U;+CPU+iPhone+OS+4_3_3+like+Mac+OS+X;+en-gb)+AppleWebKit/533.17.9+      (KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Mobile/8J2
**Good:**
Mozilla/5.0+(iPhone;+U;+CPU+iPhone+OS+4_3_1+like+Mac+OS+X;+en-us)+AppleWebKit/533.17.9+    (KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Version/5.0.2+Mobile/8G4+Safari/6533.18.5

Note that the bad is missing ‘Safari’ from the end.

How would I go about creating a filter to remove these visits from our Google Analytics?

Answer 1

You would be wrong to filter out those visits from your Analytics – they are real views, you’re just not sure of their origin.

I think the post you read about people bookmarking your website is this one:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Analytics/thread?tid=61e3d404f3c9c2bb&hl=en

The bookmarking thing is a red herring – this is the more likely reason:

If you look at the string returned from the full user-agent analysis it speaks clearly:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0_1 like Mac OS X; fr-fr) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8A306

It’s AppleWebKit.

It means that all those users come from iPhone/iPad apps using embedded functions of browsing by calling AppleWebKit capabilities inside their code.

Like it says above, most iPhone apps contain a browser that uses AppleWebKit capabilities – this is the activity you are seeing on your website.

Here are some likely scenarios:

• People subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed using an app like Reeder. When they view a post, it records a page view. When they click back on the iOS app, it records a bounce.
• Someone shares a link to your site via Twitter. Someone who clicks that link using the native iOS Twitter app. 1 visit, 1 page view, 1 bounce.
• Flipboard, Facebook, Google Mobile app, Bing app, etc, etc, etc.

Maybe you can use campaign tracking codes to see which medium (and ultimately which app) is driving the traffic?

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UPDATE: here’s an article from Search Engine Land on the topic of lost referrer data from mobile apps.

• RIP Referrer Data! How Mobile Apps Can Kill Your Mobile Metrics (6 June 2011)

Some parts of interest:

Smartphone apps are innately unable to pass “referring page” information to your site analytics, for the same reason Word docs or PDFs are not recorded as website referrers: they’re separate applications. Even for mobile apps that embed browsers (like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Groupon), there simply is no “referring page” data to pass upon click-through.

If you’re expecting to see this traffic nicely categorized in some analytic report, you’ll be waiting a while. …

The net result is that your “direct” traffic and sales counts are inflated, and that a sizable percentage of your actual mobile search and mobile social traffic is understated. That means you are likely under-investing in mobile, and giving conversion credit to other channels to boot.

On the Google Search app:

But for mobile organic, you’re out of luck. Not only does Google Analytics not record Google as the referrer, the mobile keywords that drove traffic also go incognito.

Finally:

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Until you can measure the impact mobile apps are having on your mobile ROI, it’s not difficult to imagine you’re leaving money on the table.

Again, it’s not your stats that are messed up, it’s your measurement. Filtering out your mobile visitors is a bad idea.