You don’t have to look far online to discover a new dataset signaling surges in mobile device sales and mobile content consumption.
Too often marketers develop reactionary mobile strategies upon seeing their competitors with new iPad applications or a HTML5 mobile website.
Although there’s no mistaking the growing trend of mobile content consumption, your response should be driven by your website’s mobile analytics.
Fortunately, you can segment your website analytics to uncover some very important mobile trends.
You can use these trends to develop a prudent mobile website strategy.
Some notable mobile trends to look for:
- Number of Mobile Visits as a Percentage of Site Total
- Segment for Mobile Visitor Operating System and Device Type
- Segment for Screen Resolution
- Pages Viewed per Visit on Mobile Device
Determining what percentage of your website’s total traffic comes from mobile devices and monitoring this trend over time will help you establish valuable insight into the urgency and need for a unique mobile website design.
For example, if you notice a significant amount of your mobile device visitors using devices that have full HTML browsers then you should consider not building a WAP enabled website.
Additionally, it’s important to observe the trend of pages viewed per visit by mobile device visitors. This will give you an idea of the level of engagement mobile visitors have on your website now.
You should also drill down into the mobile page content and determine what they’re consuming, how they’re consuming it, and develop strategies for your new mobile website that serves the most relevant content.
A great example of this is a restaurant. Mobile visitors on a restaurant’s website will find a flash-based menu that doesn’t render on most mobile phones useless to them.
Mobile visitors who visit restaurant websites are likely far along in the sales funnel and are ready to commit to visiting that restaurant. They are looking for a quick, fast loading menu, hours of operation or a phone number to contact for reservations.
It’s potentially a waste of money and resources to blindly invest in a mobile website strategy based on today’s latest news and statistics.
Your first action must be to patiently monitor and analyze your website’s trends then look for actionable insights before making your mobile website investment.