Is Your Responsive Design Working? Google Analytics Will Tell You

Responsive web design has become the dominant method of developing and designing websites. It makes it easier to think “mobile first” and to create a website that is viewable on mobile devices.

In the early days of responsive web design, creating breakpoints in CSS for particular screen sizes was common, like 320 pixels for iPhone and 768 pixels for iPad, and then we tested and monitored those devices. As responsive design has evolved, we now more often start with the content and then set breakpoints when the content “breaks.” This means that you might end up with quite a few content-centric breakpoints and no particular devices or form factors on which to test your website.

However, we are just guessing that our designs will perform well with different device classes and form factors and across different interaction models. We need to continually monitor a design’s performance with real traffic.

Content-centric breakpoints are definitely the way to go, but they also mean that monitoring your website to identify when it breaks is more important. This information, when easily accessible, provides hints on what types of devices and form factors to test further.

Google Analytics has some great multi-device features¹ built in; however, with responsive design, we are really designing for form factors, not for devices. In this article, we’ll demonstrate how WURFL.js² and Google Analytics can work together to show performance metrics across form factors. No more guessing.

Why Form Factor?

Speeding up and optimizing the user experience for a particular device or family of devices is always easier. In reality, though, creating a device-specific experience³ for all types of devices is not feasible, given that the diversity of web-enabled devices will just continue to grow. However, every device has a particular form factor. Luke Wroblewski⁴, author of Mobile First⁵, outlines three categories to identify device experiences⁶:

usage or posture,
input method,
output or screen.

Because devices vary between these categories, we get different form factors. Hence, treating form factor as the primary dimension through which to monitor a responsive website makes sense. This will indicate which type of device to test for usability.

The examples in this article all use WURFL.js, including the form factors provided by it, which are:

desktop,
app,
tablet,
smartphone,
feature phone,
smart TV,
robot,
other non-mobile,
other mobile.

Feeding Data To Google Analytics

The first step is to put WURFL.js on the pages that you want to track. Simply paste this line of code into your markup:

<script type="text/javascript" src="//wurfl.io/wurfl.js"></script>

This will create a global WURFL object that you can access through JavaScript:

console.log(WURFL.form_factor);

Now that the script tag is in place, the only other thing to do is add the highlighted lines of code to Google Analytics’ tracking code:

/* Google Analytics' standard tracking code */
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-99999999-1']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', example.com']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

/* Tell Google Analytics to log WURFL.js' data */
 _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',	1,’complete_device_name’,WURFL.complete_device_name,1]);
 _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',	2,'form_factor',WURFL.form_factor,1]);
 _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',	3,'is_mobile',WURFL.is_mobile,1]);

/* The rest of Analytics' standard tracking code */
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();

Or, if you have updated to Google Analytics’ new “Universal Analytics⁷“, you would add this:

/* Google Analytics' new universal tracking code */
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)})(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');
ga('create', 'UA-99999999-1, 'auto');

/* Define the custom dimensions */
ga('send', 'pageview', {
  'dimension1': WURFL.complete_device_name,
  'dimension2': WURFL.form_factor,
  'dimension3': WURFL.is_mobile
});

Further, if you are using GA Universal Analytics, you must remember to define the custom dimensions. You do that by clicking Admin → Custom Definitions → Custom Dimensions.

GAcustomdim-preview-opt — For Universal Analytics you need to define the custom dimensions in the `Admin` section. (Large preview⁹)

Footnotes

The post Is Your Responsive Design Working? Google Analytics Will Tell You appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Why Form Factor?

Feeding Data To Google Analytics

Footnotes

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