Mobile is one of those hot topics that everyone seems to be latching on to.
But do you really need to go mobile if your audience isn’t mobile? What if 99.99% of your users are accessing your site through their desktop? Does mobile still need to be at the tippy top of your marketing “TO DO” list in 2014?
Maybe not …
Mobile Trends
Some serious 2013 stats from Super Monitoring:
- [Tweet “91% of all people on earth have a mobile phone.”]
- [Tweet “56% of people own a smartphone.”]
- [Tweet “50% of mobile users use their mobile device as their primary internet source.”]
- [Tweet “80% of time spent on mobile is spent inside of apps.”]
- [Tweet “72% of tablet owners purchase online from their tablets each week.”]
View the infographic on mobile stats by Super Monitoring here.
Our friend and fellow SteamFeed’er Sarah Arrow also has a must-read post on mobile stats: Mobile Stats Every Marketer Should Know.
How To Find Out If You Need To Incorporate Mobile
Disclaimer: I think it will be important to incorporate mobile into your marketing strategy at some point. As mobile usage grows, the number of people accessing the internet (and hopefully your sites!) will make responsive design extremely important.
To find out how important mobile is to your strategy RIGHT NOW, we’re going to take a look at Google Analytics.
- Sign in to your Google Analytics account (if you don’t have one, it’s free — and easy — to set up)
- On the lefthand menu, click on ‘Audience’
- Under Audience, click on ‘Mobile’
- Under Mobile, click on ‘Overview’
- From here, you will see your mobile stats (see our example in the picture below)
- Figure out your mobile percentage use by adding together your mobile and tablet views and dividing them into your total views (341+102 = 443 / 1576 = .28109137, or 28%)
From the report you can see that of the last 30 days in 2013, we had 1576 visitors to the B Squared Media website. Of those visitors, 1133 were desktop visitors, 341 came from mobile and 102 came from tablets.
This means that 22% of our visitors accessed our site from mobile devices and 6% accessed through tablets, with a grand total of 28% of our traffic being “mobile.”
For us this is enough evidence to push responsive design to the top of our list in 2014. With smaller percentages — say 1% to 5%, you may not need to be in a rush to spend time or dollars making your site mobile friendly.
There’s one more thing you can look at to help you make your decision …
Bounce Rate
Your Bounce Rate shows you the percentage of peeps who visit only one page on your website before “bouncing” (aka: leaving). This is bad because you want potential buyers and customers to visit as many pages as possible when they land on your site.
One reason to consider making mobile-friendly changes to your website may also include your Mobile Bounce Rate.
Let’s take a look at the same report from above, but focus on the Mobile Bounce Rate:
You can see that my overall Bounce Rate is 26.27 – which isn’t bad. However, if you look at my Mobile Bounce Rate, it’s at 80%! Yikes!
This tells me that users may be having a hard time navigating the B Squared website with their mobile device, and is a HUGE factor for us when it comes to allocating funds towards a responsive design.
This is my “ammo” when I have to convince my Chief Numbers Guy, Alex, that we need to spend some of our marketing dollars on responsive design this year.
Are You Going Mobile?
So? What are your plans? Will you be using Google Analytics to help you make your decision (if you’re not already mobile responsive)?
If you want help with performing these mobile audits with Google Analytics, take advantage of our FREE 30-MINUTE CONSULTATION.
Let me know in the comments section below!
See you in the social sphere!
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16 Comments. Leave new
Great article, Brooke, and topic! These are some amazing and compelling stats! I have used Google Analytics to monitor the growing frequency of mobile traffic to our website over time. Responsive websites are definitely in order and are highly recommended by Google.
Robin Strohmaier recently posted…4 Reasons to Use YouTube to Embed Video Blogs and How to Do It
Thanks, Robin, I thought so too! I couldn’t believe my eyes when I pulled the reports and then thought, “This definitely needs to be shared!” It’s a good case (for us anyway) on using those marketing dollars for mobile.
I agree, Brooke! It is a good case for anyone who has not made the leap to a responsive website 🙂
Robin Strohmaier recently posted…Blogging is a Marathon Not a Sprint and 2013’s Top 10 Most Visited Blog Articles
Thanks again, Robin!
Great Post Brooke – we currently use a Plugin WP Touch which seems to be stopping the gap for now. However, time scheduled in to update our theme.
We use that plugin, too, Caroline! It sure does make a beautiful quick fix. I’ve noticed many other bloggers use it as well – I’m so glad you brought it up! Thanks for chiming in and adding such a valuable resource. 🙂
I recently viewed the report of google Analytics of my site, there were just half of the users visited my site with mobile devices. But I will wait, as more than half of these devices were tablets, which should not had problems with desktop site. 🙂
I think it’s wonderful that you looked at the data first, Rose! Congrats on being smart and savvy. 🙂 Mobile is definitely the way to go but it doesn’t have to be right this second. Thank you for stopping by!
Hi! Someone in my Facebook group shared this site with us so I came to give it a look. I�m definitely loving the information.|
Great! I’m so glad you found our site helpful. Thanks for stopping by. 🙂
Step by step instruction are great for new users. And as said in the blog, we need to take seriously mobile audit using Google analytics
Thanks! I’m so glad you found it useful. Google Analytics is a great place to check on your mobile and tablet website traffic if you’re unsure about the need to go mobile. 🙂
Hi Brooke,
It’s great that you brought this up to get people to start thinking about mobile if they haven’t. I read somewhere that offers a refreshing perspective and I think you’d agree – “instead of thinking mobile-first, we should think integration. Whichever medium we choose, the message should be adapted to its environment.”
What would you advise businesses to do as they consider implementing mobile tools into their strategy?
Thanks so much, Jason! Glad you stopped by and found this useful. LOVE that quote you posted.
My best advice to businesses using mobile is to ABT (always be testing). Put yourself in the consumers shoes; test your mobile site from different devices and different browsers. Ask your best clients what they think, or what they’d change. Many times we forget that perspective is based in your reality – not someone else’s. So when it comes to something that will succeed based on the perspective of others, it’s very important to understand their point of view.
Thanks again for commenting and adding your insightful thoughts!
Hi Brooke,
As a user, I spend a huge amount of time reading blogs on my smartphone,
and I find it really frustrating when I can’t resize right or get social media icons out of the way of the text.
I don’t use wordpress, so I do all my back-end hacking by hand, but I always check to see that at the very least I’m not going to irritate someone who is looking at my site with a smart phone.
I appreciate that time allocation should be worth it, and if making your website mobile friendly isn’t worth the effort cost right now, based on analytics, I can see putting it off. But as a user, if I’m going to be some blog’s regular reader, I would certainly hope they’re mobile friendly.
Hi Vernon,
I agree with you – that can be really frustration (I read a LOT from my phone, too). It’s impressive (and very commendable) that you do everything by hand AND make sure it’s user friendly.
The WP mobile plugin WP Touch is a great tool – we still use it even though our site was recently (a couple of months ago) made mobile friendly/responsive. I just find it makes things much more simple and user friendly.
Again, if you CAN go responsive, I definitely think you SHOULD (and ASAP!), but if you can’t afford it, at least look at the data and see what your users want. It’s always about them anyway. 😉
Thanks so much for stopping by!