Visits for items in the Platforms report do not match visits with the same item name in the Mobile Devices report

Visits for items in the Platforms report do not match visits with the same item name in the Mobile Devices report

For products:
Webtrends On Demand
Webtrends Analytics 9.2a

Situation:
Visits for an item such as iPhone or iPod are different in the Platforms report than in the Mobile Devices report. For example, iPod visits can be significantly higher in the Devices report than Platforms.

Solution:
Platforms is based on the operating system (OS) of the device. Multiple devices that share the same OS will be grouped together in the Platforms report.
Mobile Devices is based on a match to known mobile device names where the device uses a known mobile browser.

Both reports get their information from the User Agent string sent by the device to the browser. The two examples below show part of this string; the first from an iPhone, the second from an iPod.

(iPhone;+U;+CPU+iPhone+OS+4_0_1+like+Mac+OSX;+en-us)+AppleWebKit/532.9+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Version/4.0.5+Mobile/8A306+Safari/6531.22.7

(iPod;+U;+CPU+iPhone+OS+4_0+like+Mac+OS+X;+en-us)+AppleWebKit/532.9+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Version/4.0.5+Mobile/8A293+Safari/6531.22.7

Both use a similar OS (iPhone+OS+4_0_1+like+Mac+OSX) so will both show as "iPhone" in the platform report. There may be devices that do not use a close enough OS, e.g, older versions of iPods, to be grouped together and will be shown as a separate item in the Platforms report. The Platforms report is used when determining platform for application use. If you are developing an application that will run on iPhone software the platforms will show the number of visitors who will be able to use that application.

Both hits use a mobile browser (Mobile/8A293+Safari) so will show up in the Mobile Devices report. That report will use the device name at the start of the strings creating separate iPhone and iPod visits. The Mobile Devices report contains more granular information on which specific device visitors are using, filtered for mobile devices based on the browser used.

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