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 <gtisza(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Yay, data! Thanks for putting this together, Jon.
On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 10:14 PM, Jon Katz <jkatz(a)wikimedia.org> 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.
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