Mobile Websites - Change Your Perception, Now

Mobile is not about finding you from the road

There, we have that out of the way. Five years ago, yes - mobile websites were primarily used to provide a means for those traveling to find your address or phone number, but his train left the station quite some time ago. Mobile sites are now used for MUCH more - and from more places than you may expect.

Changing perceptions about the Where What and When - let's look at the data:

Where

We've been hearing about the ubiquitous mobile device for years, and there have been some great studies (Nielsen, others) showing the surprising and often hilarious places folks are using their devices, but we're still not seeing this hit home on most mobile sites. Knowing that mobile is no longer a "phone book on the phone" and actually changing your mobile site to reflect this knowledge still seems to be a struggle.

The first step towards improving your mobile site is to stop considering them as "mobile" visitors and start considering them as "gadget" visitors. The goal is to take this one step further and view them as "visitors".

What

The next discovery you'll make is the nature of the content that is being viewed on your site. For example, on the Goupward.com website only 10% of mobile visitors are viewing our "contact us" page - visitors are looking at our portfolio, our services and just about every other section of the site, indicating that they are simply "browsing" - which is consistent with the point of this article. When reporting across our major clients, this phenomenon seems to be consistent.

When

For most of the sites we report, mobile traffic happens at about the same time as "non-mobile" traffic. As we watch the visitor curve of our total traffic, we see the mobile traffic curve at roughly the same rate. This tells us that in most cases there is no need to tailor our content to "after hours" or "weekend" visitors. Note - the visit-time curve is not identical for all categories, but the relationship within each market is usually very similar.

What Can You Do

Start today. Look at your site metrics and decide if it's time for a mobile-friendly site. My guess is that your mobile traffic makes up better than 5% of your overall traffic. This number is much higher for some of our clients and much lower for others, but take a look for yourself and decide if it's time to give the mobile folks some love. For some, the mobile traffic is still very low, and it's just not going to be a priority, but for most of the sites on which we report, the mobile traffic is significant and should be served well for mobile devices.