Once the site is up and running, I need to know the traffic going to the mobile site. There are several mobile analytics programs available, so I decided to pick 3 of them: AdMob, Bango, and Google Analytics, and compare their results. I also analyzed my web server log for that one day to provide a reference.

The results based on one day’s worth of data are as follows:

AdMob and Bango were both a little low on pageviews. AdMob was lower by 21%, while Bango was lower by 27%. Google Analytics, on the other hand, missed out on 64% of all pageviews.

For visitors, all 3 mobile analytics tools were disappointing: Google Analytics and AdMob were too low, and Bango was too high.

In conclusion, among the 3 web analytics tools, AdMob and Bango both do an acceptable job in measuring pageviews. None of the 3 tools, on the other hand, provide a good visitor count.

Where am I going with this? Well, I have been noticing that some of the Web 2.0 sites are not yet using UTF-8 encoding. As a result, it is difficult for people in double-byte countries to use such services. An example is BlogCatalog. If you look at the source code of that site, you’ll see that the site is using character set iso-8859-1, which is for single-byte languages only. Being a blog listing service, this essentially means that they have precluded blogs from countries using double-byte languages from being listed, and it will be very difficult for them to attract visitors from countries using double-byte languages.

If you are an enterpreneur planning on launch the next great Web 2.0 site, do yourself and everyone else a favor: encode your site in UTF-8 (that’s the unicode standard most often seen). Better yet, make sure the functionalities you offer work in other languages. This way, everyone in the world can use your great site.

To read characters in Unicode, you’ll need to change the MAGPIE_OUTPUT_ENCODING variable in the rss_fetch.inc file.

BeforeÂ

if ( !defined(‘MAGPIE_OUTPUT_ENCODING’) ) {
   define(‘MAGPIE_OUTPUT_ENCODING’, ‘ISO-8859-1′);
}

After

if ( !defined(‘MAGPIE_OUTPUT_ENCODING’) ) {
   define(‘MAGPIE_OUTPUT_ENCODING’, ‘UTF-8′);
}