Mobile Browser Detection

What if you could customize the content on your website based on which mobile phone visitors are viewing your site with? Could you increase your traffic? Could you increase the time your visitors stay on your site?

Could you increase the amount of repeat traffic you see? Could you make more money? I’m sure you could do all of that! Let’s take a look at what mobile browser detection is, why you would use it, and how to do it.

What is it?

Mobile browser detection is easy to understand as a concept. It simply refers to the act of detecting the Internet browser that someone is using on their mobile device. Browser detection has existed for years in the standard PC computing realm. It originated from the need to correct graphical problems that occurred because different browsers render HTML differently. Sometimes a site will appear broken in Internet Explorer when it looks perfect in Firefox. By using browser detection, web developers are able to fix those graphical problem that only occur in Internet Explorer. As a base concept, you can apply that to mobile browsers as well, but I have some much more interesting applications for you.

Why would you use it?

Suppose you have a website that delivers mobile industry news to your visitors. What if you knew that the person visiting your site was visiting it from an iPhone? You could deliver iPhone-related news directly to the home page. The more relevant the content is that your visitor first sees, the more likely they are to stay and return to your site. Here is another example. Suppose you are a mobile application developer and you’ve developed an application that is available for iPhones, Google Android devices, and Blackberry devices. Let’s say you are going to send out an email with a link in it for someone to download and install your application.

Using browser detection you can use one link to deliver the iPhone application directly to iPhones, the Google Android application directly to Google Android devices, and so on. You can even have a message display if someone visits that link in a desktop browser which shows them additional information about the application and which devices it’s available on.

How do you do it?

Every browser has something called the user agent string that identifies which browser it is. By using JavaScript or any server side language like PHP or ASP, you can access that user agent string and then respond accordingly. Typically that response would be to redirect the browser to a webpage built specifically for that browser. So if someone is using Internet Explorer, you could redirect them to ie.html or if they are using Firefox you can redirect them to ff.html. There are many pre-made scripts that you can find by searching Google for “mobile browser detection” and finding one that you are comfortable implementing.

If you apply the information that I’ve shown you, there should be no reason you can’t increase traffic, conversions, and revenue by using mobile browser detection to market directly to mobile users.