1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to tracking and reporting usage data from mobile device-specific Internet sites as well as from Internet sites accessed through the mobile web or on mobile devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Although the processes used by conventional Internet analytics tools to track and report usage statistics vary, the tools fall into two main groups. The first group includes tools that track data through a web service. The second group includes tools that process raw log files from a server.
Some analytics tools, especially those that track data through a web service, involve technologies, programming languages, and features that are only available or supported on Internet sites accessed through traditional PC-based web browsers. These mechanisms are not supported on mobile device-specific Internet sites or sites accessed through mobile browsers on hand-held devices, cell phones, and other non-PC-based browsers. For example, tracking “cookies” used by Internet sites are removed by some carrier gateways prior to reaching the user and are not supported on all mobile devices. Redirect algorithms in which a user is first directed to a tracking site and then to the destination site do not work on all devices, can cause devices to crash, and can result in poor performance due to the slow nature of redirecting from one site to the next, especially over mobile networks. Thus, these tools are not able to accurately report data across the wide array of device types accessing a mobile device-specific Internet site.
Tools that process raw log files require access to a publisher's raw log files, which some publishers may not have access to or may have distributed on multiple machines. Thus, the processing of these log files is often expensive, time consuming, and may require coordination for distributed logs. In addition to these challenges, the conventional methods used to aggregate data about visitors when processing these raw log files do not work well for logs from sites accessed by mobile users. Specifically, any algorithm that makes use of IP addresses to attempt to uniquely identify users is not well suited for mobile users, because most mobile users access the Internet through a carrier gateway proxy that will show the same IP address for multiple users.
As a further drawback, conventional tools and services, whether tracking data through a web service or by processing raw log files from a server, do not track or report data specific to mobile usage or arising from mobile devices, mobile browsers, and mobile carrier gateways, including but not limited to device capabilities, carrier gateway information, and device header information.