How to Analyze Mobile Web vs Desktop Web Traffic in Amplitude

I’ve often been asked how to analyze mobile web vs desktop web in Amplitude Analytics. People are often familiar with “Device Category” in Google Analytics and want something similar. In Amplitude, it’s a little trickier, but here’s my solution.

Platform = Web

Let’s quickly get this case out of the way — if your mobile users are using a native app, then this traffic can be filtered by setting “Platform = Mobile”.

So what’s left? “Platform = Web”. But we all know the web can be accessed through a browser on various devices of different sizes, which often have a different user experience and are used in different contexts. What we’d like is a way to distinguish smartphone usage from desktop usage. Let’s see how we do that.

Device Type

Create an event segmentation chart, choose “Any Active Event”, filter for “Platform = Web”, and group by “Device type”. You’ll see values for a list similar to the following:

In nearly all cases, over 95% of usage is on the first 4 device types: Windows, Android, Apple iPhone, and Mac. As such, we can use these as the basis for our Mobile Web vs Desktop Web segmentation.

Creating the Segments

Delete the grouping and look to the top right. Create 3 user segments as follows:

And you’ll get a chart like the one below:

note: “other” will often be mostly iPads

You can save this segmentation, and use it in various analyses across different chart types in Amplitude.

I work as a product analytics consultant, and if you need any help with an analysis project or training your team, please get in touch.