Reading Time: 4 minutesIn a world saturated with technology, it often seems impossible to separate ourselves from digital touchpoints in our daily lives. When you should be spending time with your spouse, you are surfing Facebook on your tablet. You should be enjoying dinner with your children and find yourself continuing to pick up your phone. Instead of hanging out with a friend, you sit asking Alexa to tell you another joke.
Notice in these examples that not once did I mention someone sitting on the couch, at the dinner table, etc. engaging with their desktop computer. While we may make resolutions to break away from portable devices in our daily lives, how can we harness this in our professional lives? Ultimately, what is mobile traffic worth to your company’s bottom line?
Mobile-Bound
For those of us in the world of digital marketing, “mobile” has become a daily buzzword. As many shifts in consumer outlets are catering to the mobile usage explosion, this device type leads daily device usage trends.
Most notably, Google’s Mobile-First initiative is soon taking effect to help give mobile users an efficient mobile search experience.
Considering that we are now three years past the point of more mobile web users vs. desktop users, there are a few questions we need to consider as they pertain to mobile, and your company’s success.
Taking a Deeper Look
With the use of a few tools, we can glean impactful insight on whether your website is mobile-deficient or whether you may soon be ripe for converting mobile users into site objectives.
How much of our site traffic is coming from mobile and how profitable are they?
Google Analytics can tell us quite a bit about the composition of your site traffic. For this exercise, we want to look at the Mobile section within the Audience tab.
Q1: What percentage of our traffic is coming from mobile?
Q2: Comparing monthly traffic to the same time period in the last two years, how has the percentage of mobile users changed?
Q3: What are the user behavior metrics showing you, especially bounce rates?
Q4: How does the conversion percentage or eCommerce rate compare from a mobile user to the desktop user?
This high-level look at traffic by device is quite telling and lets us understand just how important a focus upon mobile users might be.
These are great general questions to consider in your initial exploration into what mobile means to your company site. However, let’s take a slightly deeper look, which will breed additional questions.
From our previous view of analytics, we take a deeper look, but filtering to only look at mobile traffic and then setting a secondary dimension of default channel grouping.
Q5. What channels are driving mobile traffic? Again, as we are exploring above, how does user behavior and conversion performance fair between the channels?
What is the difference in the experience we provide, mobile vs. desktop?
Now that we know how much traffic is coming into the site via mobile and especially from each referring channel type, we can start thinking about the experience that we provide to site users. Directly accessing your company site for a desktop machine can be a vastly different and non-confusing approach to your site vs. what your site visitors are experiencing.
A year or two ago the main mobile discussion point was whether you had a mobile responsive site or not. Now that most of us have a responsive site, we must think about what the user does once they are on the site as well as what they are doing or seeing before they make it to the site. Before they make it to the site, what do you mean?
Q6. How do we engage the user, “pre-click”? Is your email template responsive? Do you have enticing, but concise titles and descriptions for mobile search results or are you using Call extensions for AdWords advertising? If you have a low bounce rate for these channels you may be driving traffic, but confused visitors.
For those who do land on the site, we must consider the difference in on-page behavior of mobile users vs. desktop users. We suggest analyzing this via Lucky Orange. For those of you who are Vizion Interactive clients, you have heard us talk about this platform and you also have complimentary access.
Q7. What does on-page click behavior look like from desktop to mobile.
A good example of the difference in display and behavior can be seen above. Notice how desktop users are more apt to click on the Contact Us towards the middle of the page as well as the Get Quote button in the upper right side of the screen. Now, comparing in the mobile presentation, we are not seeing the click activity on the Contact Us link and we don’t have the Get Quote call-to-action button so we are losing out on that conversion potential.
Conclusion
In seven quick questions, hopefully you have found whether you are losing out on servicing your mobile users. Even if you are in good shape currently, this exercise should start to help stimulate other ideas on how you can continue to dissect this traffic and understand how you can help to make mobile work for your bottom line!
