The future of search is definitely in mobile search. This is why it’s important for companies to start really identifying how they are going to get involved and how they are going to measure it. I found some interesting statistics on Brian Clifton’s blog and wanted to share them here.

• Mobile web browsing as a proportion of total web browsing is currently very small at 0.72 percent, though growing. [NetMarketingShare via Econsultancy.com blog, March 2009]

• US Smartphone users spent an average of 4.6 hours per month on mobile Internet sites. [M:Metrics via Marketing Charts, May 2008]

• In the US, 63.2m people used their mobiles to find news and information in January 2009, more than double that of January 2008. [comScore, March 2009]

• Of 182 million people in China with Web-enabled mobile phones, 102 million (56 percent) use the devices to connect to the Web. [Netpop Research via Clickz, April 2009]

As with paid and organic search, it’s great to be optimized and have good keywords, but how do you track the results? How do you see who has come to your site through those keywords or landing pages?

Well, for mobile, Smartphone users are automatically tracked like all other website visitors. The difference is in how to identify and then target them. Because the data is small, it will be buried in your Analytics. You need to create an advanced segment to more quickly find and use this information.

Advanced segments detect either the visitor’s operating system or browser type and matches it against a known lookup list.  Both operating system and browser type must be specified in this section of your Google Analytics to make sure that the mobile users are captured. The advanced segments will track the visitors and you will have the data from mobile users easily and in one place.

Google Analytics blog gives you more information to get started, with detailed images. Happy tracking!