Going Mobile A Reality Check
Google is forcing you to be mobile ready or in three weeks time you will get smashed in mobile search. As Ive demonstrated previously, that can mean a large chunk of revenue for some businesses. In case you missed it, on April 21 Google will be launching an update to mobile search results. If that wasn’t motivation enough, you can take a deeper dive on your analytics to see how you are currently leaking cash on mobile devices. If you are already mobile friendly this is still a great exercise to do.
How Is Mobile Converting?
Go into Google Analytics and under acquisition, select source/medium . This is the area where you can see where the traffic is coming from. Then click into google / organic and select the secondary dimension drop down and under User, select Device Category.
This will then give you a break down of desktop, mobile and tablet traffic. From here you can not only see the volumes of different traffic you can also see how users on different devices act on your site. For instance we had a site redesign last December and incorporated responsive into the redesign. The difference in session duration for mobile users, coming in from Google organic is stark when I do a before and after comparsion. The easier to use site on Mobile gets them checking out more content. Conversely when I look at a Google shopping campaign and the different device behaviour on a site that is not mobile optimised, I can see that desktop is out performing mobile by 300%.
In this example, mobile has 23% of the traffic but only 7% of the revenue. Tablets, which have half the traffic of mobiles, are generating more revenue. This client could double revenue from mobile devices buy going responsive.
When I have a look at total traffic for this client over the last year, there is $200k they have left on the table. So regardless of a Google Mobile Update, it really makes good business sense to be mobile friendly.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
