Plone Mobile

I've been putting together a presentation on various web metrics for the gang at my day-job.  In particular, people are asking about Google Analytics.  As part of that, I've been poking around in a few less frequented parts of the system and some of that has carried over to inquiries about Plone.org users.  Tonight I'm going to focus on the growing mobile community of visitors. 

Above is the graph of visitors using mobile devices since GA started tracking them in November 2009.  The most notable feature is the incredible peak that marks the release of Plone 4.0.  The aftershocks lasted two weeks. 

The other significant feature is the upward trend.  There is a perceptible upward slope to the number of mobile users.  In fact, if we remove the Plone 4.0 spike, the regression analysis still gives us a slope of 0.13 (a new mobile visitor every seven days).  The regression coefficient (R^2) is only 0.65, so there's lots of noise in the data, mostly from weekday-weekend fluctuations.

To really see the trend, compare the last month with the same period a year ago.  Clearly mobile use is on the upswing.

My final note is on the distribution of mobile users.  From the city-level global map of mobile visitors to Plone.org, it's pretty obvious that mobile users are world-wide.  Of course, it comes as no surprise that mobile use tracks Plone.org general use, heavy in North America and Europe.  But there are significant hotspots in South America, the Middle East, south and east Asia, as well as Australia and New Zealand.