Having a mobile-friendly version of your website is becoming more important than ever. Don’t believe us? Consider the following statistics:
- 69 percent of US mobile users access the internet on their phones daily
- 70% of all mobile searches result in action (e.g. purchase) within 1 hour
- Mobile coupon redemption rates are 10 times that of mail or newspaper-distributed coupons
Smartphone ownership in the United States and across the world is on the rise, and the days of using your phone solely for sending text messages and making calls are long gone. As highlighted by the statistics above, consumers are increasingly using their cell phones for accessing the Internet, connecting with their friends on social networking websites like Facebook, and searching for local businesses. Just a few days ago, Google reported that 62% of searches for restaurants on Valentine’s Day originated from high-end devices or tablets, e.g. iPhone.
But just what is a mobile-friendly website? In short, it’s a version of your website that is specifically formatted for efficient use and display on phone screens, which are significantly smaller than those of classic desktops or laptops. The goal is to make it easier for the mobile customer to find the information that he/she is looking for quickly, without forcing him to wait for all of your images to load and then awkwardly zooming in just to be able to find your address and phone number.
In future posts, we’ll go into more depth about the options that you have available for actually developing and deploying a mobile-friendly website, but to start off, we wanted to quickly demonstrate how you can use Google Analytics to find out what percentage of your current visitors are accessing your website from a mobile device. Assessing the size of your current mobile audience is critical for implementing a long-term mobile marketing strategy. Our assumption is that you have Google Analytics installed on your website. If you’re using a different platform to gather site usage data, let us know in the comments below and we’ll do our best to help you out.
Measuring Mobile Traffic Using Google Analytics:
- Assuming that the Standard Reporting tab is selected, click on the Advanced Segments button. Then select the + New Custom Segment button in the lower right corner.
- In the “Name” text box, enter “Mobile Traffic” (or something similar).
- In the first segment configuration window, select “Include”, followed by “Mobile” in the dimension. You can get to mobile by scrolling down and right-clicking or typing “mobile” (without quotation marks) into the available text box and selecting the option with your cursor.
- Make sure that “Exactly Matching” is selected in the next dropdown box, and enter “Yes” (without quotation marks) in the text box at the very end.
- Just to make sure it works, click the “Preview Segment” button at the bottom. Unless you’ve had zero visitors access your website in the last 30 days using a mobile phone (an unlikely scenario), you should see at least some data points.
- If all looks good, click the “Save Segment” button.
To see how your mobile traffic compares to your overall traffic patterns, simply return to the Standard Reporting home screen, select the Advanced Segments button, and check off the All Visits option under Default Segments on the left and Mobile Traffic under Custom Segments on the right. Then click the “Apply” button.
Within seconds, Google Analytics will generate a new Visitors Overview graph that’ll include data points for mobile traffic.
Of course, with the Mobile Traffic segment selected, you can also compare variables like the average time on your site, the number of pages viewed per visit, bounce rate, etc. All of that information is available straight from the Standard Reporting screen.
In coming weeks, look forward to posts highlighting businesses that have been able to significantly increase their online revenue by deploying a mobile-friendly version of their website as well as detailed guides on how to make the mobile transition yourself.
What percentage of your visitors access your website using a mobile phone? Let us know in the comments!