According to Nielsen's latest data, 55% of US mobile phone owners now have smartphones. Android usage has reached 51% and Apple's iOS is now down to 34%. Several of the SEO blogs I follow were abuzz yesterday with statistics and speculations of how all these mobile users are changing website and search usage.
The findings and reports yesterday focused on restaurants, auto, and travel industries. I decided to apply their finding to the jewelry industry and here's the important things I found.
62.4% of mobile traffic comes from mobile Google search. (Bing was too small to measure.)
22.5% of mobile traffic comes from referrals from other sites.
15.1% of mobile traffic comes from people who typed the domain name in directly.
59.7% of all mobile visitors entered a jewelry website through the home page.
96.1% of the mobile visitors I tracked to US jewelry sites were from the US. There's always some percentage of foreign visitors to jewelry websites; I just took this measurement to see how it compared to the typical 90.5% of full site visitors from the US.
My thoughts are that the 15.1% of consumers are exposed to your ad/brand through some other media and they review your site via mobile in that instant or shortly thereafter.
Mobile users need to be given the choice to move between your full website or the mobile version of your website. If you force the mobile version on them, then you need to give them a clear link back to the full website. Although Google recommends having identical information on both the mobile and PC versions of your site, technology implementation make it very tough recommendation to follow. My personal recommendation is to have a simpler mobile website that shows people what they need to know when they are mobile.
What I found most interesting reviewing the mobile data this time is that mobile Google referrals and mobile direct traffic was almost a straight line in my report. In other words, over the last 30 days the mobile device usage was consistent day in and day out, without regard to the day of the week. In fact, the mobile usage numbers didn't even dip on July 4th.
These measurements are very new, and there's a lot of fast growing interest in mobile technologies. I'm going to draw 2 conclusions from these numbers.
1. Mobile users are always on. That means your mobile website needs to be up to date 7 days of the week. Usually we can slack off content updates and announcements on Saturdays and Sundays, but not anymore because the weekend mobile visitor might never return to your site again.
2. As a technology guy, I know that website software maintenance and hardware maintenance usually results in down time. That website down time is usually scheduled for overnight hours, weekends, and holidays. As mobile users become more important so will the uptime of your website. Maintaining better website uptime will be a greater challenge for your web programmer, and that means more money.
You only have 1 chance to make your first website impressions. By this time next year that first impression might be more important with mobile than full websites.
Start planning now because you need to increase your website budget.
