Check out the details behind our methodology for the new iPhone 5 Adoption Tracker coming out of Chitika Insights.
To see what percentage of iPhones within the Chitika network are the iPhone 5, Chitika Insights performed an analysis of the unique impressions seen originating from iPhones. The team then determined the share of iPhone 5 impressions by analyzing the user agent and the device’s screen resolution. The following paragraphs detail the methodology behind iPhone 5 Tracker coming out of Chitika Insights.
Impressions
Determination: An impression can be determined as an iPhone through an analysis of the user agent. All iPad user agents pass a string similar to this:
Mozilla/5.0(iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 6_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10
Screen Resolution: Because the iPhone 5 uses the same Retina Display technology as the 4S, pixel density alone cannot serve as an accurate measure of identifying the iPhone 5. From here, we look at the screen resolution within the impression. The iPhone 5 logs a 320×568 screen resolution; whereas older iPhones, such as the iPhone 4S, report a resolution of 320×480. An iPhone with the new screen resolution of 320×568 and a pixel density ratio of 2 will be counted as an iPhone 5; otherwise the phone will be counted as an older version.
Reporting
Pie Chart: The percentage reported in the pie chart represents a rolling 24-hour average of iPhone traffic. The percentages are simply the count of each particular group (iPhone 3&4, iPhone 5) divided by a total count of all iPhone traffic observed.
Line Chart: The line chart highlights adoption rate by hour. For each hour, the methodology is the same as in the pie chart, except shown in a time series. For example, if iPhone 5 impressions made up 5% of all iPhone impressions on September 23rd at midnight, and 6% at September 24th at midnight, the chart would highlight this growth and show all of the hours in between.