Of all global Internet traffic, an estimated 20% and 33% comes from mobile, according to a reports by digital agency Walker Sands and StatCounter, and the percentage continues to rise. iPhone traffic is outpacing than Android, and on tablets, users are more likely to make purchases.
But your brand's traffic is not the same as the Internet's, and your audience or target market may have different behaviors than web users at large. Although trends can offer direction, measuring your own traffic by device can be a powerful metric in making both marketing and product decisions.
See also: How to Improve Your Mobile Marketing Strategy
Traffic by device will tell you if someone is visiting your website via a mobile browser (Safari, Chrome or other) and by device (Android, iPhone, iPad or other). Based on this information, you can discover other details such as the screen size and resolution. A few years ago, you may have created a separate mobile website optimized for a small smartphone screen — but now that tablets running both iOS and Android come in multiple sizes and some phones have larger (nearly tablet-sized) screens, it's no longer enough to be dualistic.
But before you redesign your website to be responsive or create a mobile app, pay attention to your traffic by device to discover what decisions should be made to optimize your reach and conversions on mobile.
Most analytics services, whether it's Google Analytics or even the back-end of a hosting service like Squarespace offer this metric. You may want to compare these numbers to your desktop traffic or to one another. Note which devices are leading in conversions and how it compares to your site overall, and learn where your mobile users are coming from.
If an increasing percentage of your users are visiting your site via mobile, you will need to optimize your site itself for mobile. Of course, desktop still most likely accounts for the majority of traffic, even though the number is decreasing compared to mobile, so your website design should keep smartphones, tablets and desktop in mind. You can remove certain elements from a website when it appears on a small screen, but you won't want to remove so many elements that will compromise a user's ability to navigate.
"From a design perspective, a high degree of mobile or tablet traffic means you need to optimize your site for those platforms ASAP, if you haven't already," says Jon Gibs, VP of analytics at Huge.
"Responsive design has mitigated this to some degree, but it is still important to watch. [Increasing mobile traffic] also may signal that a specific brand may want to increase its efforts in developing mobile, tablet or SmartTV apps to account for the new usage patterns."
When it comes to apps, iOS accounts for 94% of tablet traffic and 72% of smartphone traffic — so even though Apple does not have market share to that extent, these devices are being used more than their competitors. If a native app could offer a better experience of your site than your mobile site does, perhaps it is worth the investment. This is more likely to be the case for an ecommerce site focused on mobile impulse transactions than for other types of businesses.
"We typically find that mobile devices have a lower conversion rate, higher bounce rate and generally lower levels of engagement," says Gibs, explaining that it might, at first glance, look like mobile is failing. "But what is really happening is that [the mobile experience] is meeting the needs of the user at the time. For example, ecommerce sites are frequently used for navigation to a store or as a price comparison tool at a store, and the person might not in fact convert on the site, but they are very well converting in the store — or even better, leaving a competitor's store to come to yours."
Learn how your users are behaving on mobile and optimize design and functionality to drive more of those behaviors.
When planning a marketing strategy, keep in mind that your marketing assets may be consumed via mobile. The Dove Real Beauty Sketches ad was three minutes, much longer than the usual 30-second spot, but that certainly didn't hinder viewing.
Unilever Brand Manager Kathryn Fokides says the Dove team analyzes how much of the video's traffic came from mobile versus desktop. If a longer video is received well, specifically on mobile, it's worth not only producing more similar assets, but also finding mobile-first ways to promote them, such as social media or retargeting consumers who watched and shared the Beauty Sketches with previews of next year's fresh content.
Media companies should be especially cognizant of traffic on various devices. Since ad inventory is often sold several months in advance, it's crucial to forecast how much of your traffic will be on mobile six months from now, as is being aware of what ad products you can offer on specific devices.
"Mobile pages tend to have lower ad inventory levels and higher prices per ad unit," says Gibs. "As a media company is charting its financial future, forecasting the amount of traffic that is coming from any given source can have significant impact on future revenue."
How does your business use the traffic-by-device metric? Tell us in the comments.
Mashable composite. Image: iStockphoto, Nik_Merkulov