Analytics Glossary

Device Type

Desktop, mobile, or tablet — know which experience your visitors actually get.

Device type is the classification of website visitors by the kind of device they use — desktop, mobile, or tablet. It is one of the first numbers to check when deciding what to improve, because it tells you which version of your site most customers actually experience.

The stakes are practical. If 70% of your traffic is mobile and your booking form is fiddly on a phone, you are losing customers on the device most of them use. A bakery whose visitors are 80% mobile should obsess over how the menu and directions look on a phone screen; a B2B consultancy with 75% desktop traffic can prioritize the desktop experience with confidence.

Crafty Meerkat shows your device breakdown on the Analytics page, alongside browser and operating system reports for deeper technical insight — useful when you or your developer need to reproduce a problem a customer reported (“it looks broken on Safari”).

How it works

The tracking snippet reads each visit’s user agent (the short description every browser sends about itself) and classifies it as desktop, mobile, or tablet, along with the browser and operating system. No personal details are involved — the classification describes the software, not the person. The dashboard aggregates these into a device chart you can filter by date range, and you can filter the rest of your analytics by device type to see, for example, whether mobile visitors bounce more than desktop visitors.

How to put it to work

1
Find your device mix
Open your Analytics page and check the device breakdown. Note the split — most small-business sites today land between 50% and 75% mobile.
2
Compare behavior across devices
Filter your dashboard by device. If mobile visitors have a much higher bounce rate or lower conversion rate than desktop, the mobile experience needs attention.
3
Test your site on the winning device
Walk through your most important journey — find, read, contact or buy — on the device most of your visitors use. Fix whatever felt slow or awkward.
4
Watch page speed by real visits
Mobile connections are less forgiving. Use the Speed page to see real-visit load times, and prioritize fixes if your mobile-heavy audience waits too long.

Tips from the den

◆Design and test for your actual device mix, not the industry average — your audience may be very different from the typical one.
◆A sudden shift in device mix often follows a marketing change: social media traffic skews mobile, while newsletter traffic often skews desktop.
◆Check the browser report before dismissing a customer complaint — a layout bug can be real on one browser and invisible on yours.

See it live — no signup

The demo dashboard runs on a real site with real traffic.

Open the live demo →

Common questions

Why do mobile visitors behave differently from desktop visitors?

Context. Mobile visitors are often on the move, on slower connections, and looking for something specific — an address, a phone number, a price. Desktop visitors more often research and compare. Higher mobile bounce rates are partly natural, but a large gap between mobile and desktop conversion usually points to a fixable mobile experience problem.

Does Crafty Meerkat show browsers and operating systems too?

Yes. Alongside the desktop/mobile/tablet split, your Analytics page reports the browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and so on) and operating systems your visitors use. This is mainly useful for troubleshooting — knowing that 40% of your visitors use Safari tells you exactly where a Safari-only bug hurts.

What share of my traffic should be mobile?

There is no “should” — it depends on your business. Restaurants, salons, and local services often see 70%+ mobile; professional services and software businesses see far more desktop. The point of the metric is not to match a benchmark but to make sure the experience is excellent on whichever device your customers actually use.