Mobile Marketing Statistics 2013

Statistics on mobile usage and adoption to inform your mobile marketing strategy

“Mobile to overtake fixed Internet access by 2014” was the big headline from the widely shared infographic at the end of this post summarising the bold prediction from 2008 by Mary Meeker, an analyst at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (see latest KPCB technology trends).

To help you keep up-to-date with the rise in consumer and company adoption of mobile and its impact on mobile marketing, Dave Chaffey, Rob Thurner and I will be keeping this post updated throughout 2013 as the new stats come through to support our New 120 page Expert members Ebook explaining how to create a  mobile marketing strategy. We also have a free summary mobile briefing for Basic members.

June 2013 update: new data on mobile device visit share and conversion rates for Ecommerce sites

The Monetate Q1 2013 Ecommerce Quarterly gives insight on smartphone vs tablet vs desktop share of audience for large Ecommerce brands. The alert linked to above gives more information on their volume and some add-to-cart / basket data for referrers also.

This source is useful since it’s a regular survey showing the growth in use of mobile site visitors. You can see that tablet and smartphone use nearly doubled in the year based on 500 million visits for these retail clients (see link above for methodology). Mobile share is now around 25% on average.

This data also enables you to drill down to see usage by device type, for example iPad is still the dominant tablet, but Kindle Fire and Android tablets now account for 10% of tablets.

If you’re creating a business case for mobile optimised sites as explained in our mobile marketing strategy guide, this data is also valuable since it shows the variation in conversion rate by mobile type.  In Q1 2013 tablets exceeded traditional desktop devices for conversion rates for the first time suggesting people are increasingly comfortable with the experience of buying on tablets.

However, it’s a different story for Smartphones since these convert at one third of the rate of traditional or tablet devices.

This suggests smartphones are more of browse or research platform rather than a buy platform since many of the large retailers featured in this survey will have mobile optimised sites.

April 2013 update: App usage (80% of time) dominates browsers in mobile usage

We reported comScore data in May 2012 that showed that on smartphones 82% of mobile media time is via apps.  This is a key insight as companies decide whether to develop mobile apps or create mobile device specific apps. In April 2013 mobile analytics vendor Flurry released a useful summary of category of app usage across smartphones and tablets and similarly to the previous report it shows that app usage dominates browser usage as they put it: It’s an App World. The Web Just Lives in It. You do have to be careful about interpreting this though, since Facebook, games and utility apps will naturally have the greatest time spent and browser use is still significant by volume if not proportion.

February 2012 update: The 5 best sources for mobile marketing statistics?

This update to this post features some of the latest updates on mobile statistics from 2012 and highlight some of the best sources to make the business case for investment in mobile marketing in your presentations and business cases to colleagues or clients.

• 1. Google Mobile Planet. A regular survey for different countries starting in 2011, this enables you to prepare your own reports. We recommend this source for the range of countries covered:

In addition to downloads for each country, you can also create your own charts focusing on KPIs of interest. For example, if you’re based in Australia you can look at usage by demographic.

The weakness of the current data is that it focuses on Smartphones, not tablets. It may be useful for pushing back against over-enthusiastic colleagues or understanding consumer barriers. For example, less than a third of Australians have ever bought on a smartphone and you can see there are barriers of security and preference for desktop purchases.

Wave 2 was in spring 2012, with Wave 1 in 2011. Hopefully Wave 3 is due for 2013.  You can read about the sample size in each country.

• 2. ITU. The International Telecoms Union data reports mobile usage including mobile broadband subscriptions to show growth in use of mobile. This reported at country, continent and overall levels, so is the best overall source for mobile penetration worldwide. Much of the information is free – see their free mobile statistics section.

• 3. Xyologic app download reports. This is a great source for showing the overall level of app usage across the four major mobile app platforms by country and drilling down into the popularity of individual apps for different sectors like retail, banking and travel. Around 30 countries are covered, for example, if you’re based in Canada:

We also recommend the Flurryblog (http://blog.flurry.com) for specific reports on trends in app usage. For example, this recent compilation of app usage shows the dominance of games and social networking and the potential of utilities.

• 4. Comscore Digital Future Series.

Comscore is one of key worldwide sources useful for marketers to help us find out about the changes in use of mobile media by consumers. This graph shows the pattern across Europe – follow the link above for US and other country breakdowns.

The report shows much lower levels of adoption in other European countries though – not even a fifth in most. So extrapolating UK behaviour to other countries would seem to be a mistake with the mobile figure still key.

The report also has useful summary of dayparts of different device behaviour, similar to others published.

Retail mobile use

Mobile was again the focus of the section on retail statistics. Audience growth rate is 80% + on mobile in these UK sites, but lower on grocer sites for obvious reasons.

• 5. Ofcom Internet usage report. Ofcom’s seventh International Communications Market Report was published on 13th December 2012, this examines take-up, availability, price and use of broadband, landlines, mobiles, TV, radio and post across 17 major countries.

Global increase in use of mobile browsing – May 2012

Here’s some interesting new data showing how mobile use varies between different parts of the world. Look at the scale and growth of mobile usage in Asia in particular.

Source: Pingdom, May 2012

This table also shows the dramatic growth rates in mobile share of web traffic across the world over the last two years:

Consumer preferences for using mobile commerce for retail

We know from the oft-quoted stat later in this post that mobile access to the Internet will exceed desktop access by 2012. But when reviewing mobile adoption statistics, it’s access doesn’t equate to usage or preference. Good evidence is presented in this new research published by eMarketer on Jan 24th, 2012.

It shows that PC/laptop purchases are preferred by 87% of respondents, with mobile websites preferable compared to apps for retail.

Mobile usage statistics in Europe

We now add some detail to consumer mobile preferences using the latest July 2011 Comscore Mobile Lens data on Mobile phone usage.

The latest data (collected May 2011) suggests that mobiles are not used as widely as might be expected, given the hype, for different web applications across Europe, with just 32% using a mobile browser across these 5 European countries, although the figure exceeds 40% in the UK.

Mobile retail usage in Europe

Looking at the retail sector, we can see that just 1 in 10 use mobile access to retail sites through mobile web and apps.

However, the report does show the future growth potential with year-on-year growth rates of 80% suggesting a brighter future for mobile usage.

If you’re a retailer planning your strategy then the report has additional info on breakdown between mobile web and app access to retail. The stats that matter most will be the % of visitors already accessing or buying by mobile and I know this is over 10% in many cases.

Dave Chaffey

In 3 years mobile “should” take over desktop internet usage

What do you think? Either way – this info-graphic from Microsoft Tag provides some serious food for thought and it’s great to see this data together to help with future marketing planning.