Chart of the Day: How the importance of mobile search varies by sector

It's often said that we're now well past the mobile tipping point where mobile accounts for more than half of site visits and searches. Yet this average masks a wide variation across sectors. For example, in B2B search is still dominated by desktop rather than mobile. At Smart Insights we see just 15% of our 500,000+ new organic visits are mobile. This recently published research from Hitwise from the US and UK shows the difference in the percentage of mobile search by B2C industry sectors.

Mobile search share by industry: United States

Mobile search share by industry: United Kingdom

The main sectors where desktop is still relatively important are banking,…

Mobile sales are growing rapidly, but many still fail to properly account for them in their analytics.

Most Americans use mobile devices at some stage in the purchasing process, but mobile-influenced sales can be tricky to pin down. Marketers need to quantify mobile’s impact; failing to do so paints an incomplete sales picture and undervalues the ROI your mobile strategy produces. Mobile is now overtaking desktop in overall usage. Data assembled for the KPCB mobile technology trends survey shows that people spend 51 percent of their time on mobile and only 42 percent on desktop. Even more use mobile to research purchases or look for discounts. An ideal method to help pinpoint a mobile ad campaign’s effectiveness is mobile app attribution, which tracks app installs, in-app purchases, completions, and other mobile-related behaviors. The majority of marketers have a more difficult attribution challenge than tracking digital downloads. If you sell…

Chart of the Day: The amount of time people spend using messaging apps in Europe, Latin America & Asia has grown by up to 10 times that of the USA

In a recent report by ComScore measuring the percentage of time the average user spends using messenger apps versus all other mobile activity found that people outside the USA, UK and Canada spend significantly more of their time on mobile using these apps. The messenger apps included in the report were the 5 key apps globally, Facebook messenger (with over a billion installs on Android - who doesn't have this on their phones), WhatsApp (and this one), Line, WeChat & QQ messenger. These 5 apps share 1.4% of all mobile minutes in the USA and 2.3% in the UK, but when you compare that against 15.8% in Mexico and 14.9% in Indonesia the difference is staggering. …

Now mobile is the norm, marketers need to re-think how they approach a broad range of tactics

By the end of last year there were 2 billion mobile users worldwide. This amounts to 400% growth in just a decade and the figure is bound to have increased since this date. 80% of internet users access it via their mobile phones and this should be a huge warning signal to all businesses that their marketing, sales and communications strategies must all have a 'mobile-first' focus. All business owners have had it drummed into them that their website must be responsive, it’s what customers expect, and whilst this is true , it can’t stop there. Your entire strategy needs to be based on the assumption that users could be viewing your online communications, emails, social posts and more from practically any device, and more than likely a smartphone or tablet. How is…

Chart of the Day: New Survey reveals that the vast majority of B2B buyers across all generations consider mobile devices essential

If you work in B2B marketing you may have been thinking that all this 'mobile-first' lark only need apply to your B2C friends. After all, serious B2B buyers use desktops, right? Wrong. Okay, so that's an overstatement. Of course, they use desktops, but they also use mobile. And not just the hip young millennial buyers - new research shows in even the 50+ group (baby boomers) say that a mobile device is essential to their job. The results come from a salesforce report which asked over 7,000 business buyers about their device usage in October 2016. Because terms like 'millennial' are often poorly defined, I thought it would be worth delineating the age ranges counted as in each generation for this report. In the graph below, millennials were regarded as being 18-35, gen-Xers as…

As App Downloads fall and engagement stalls, PWAs look set to be the future of the mobile web experience.

Google has generated more than it's fair share of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) in its time. AMPs are still fairly new but have been enthusiastically taken up by many publishers for the faster mobile experiences they offer. But now Google are pushing new kind of web page, which comes with its own TLA and offers the possibility of radically changing the way many consumers use the internet. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) Progressive Web Apps are web pages that work more like an app (hence the name). Being web pages means they don't need to be downloaded from an App Store like Google play or Apple's App store. This removes friction from the user's journey (which Google is very keen on) and also keeps users within the Google ecosystem (If they're using a Chrome browser), which…

Chart of the Day: iOS captures 45% of US Smartphone market in Q3 2016, but Android leads with 51% of users

Us marketers are used to hearing our ilk banging on about the need to optimize for mobile. If you are thinking about going that step further with mobile marketing and developing your own mobile app, you'll want to know which mobile operating system you should build your app for. The latest third quarter results from the US market point to a more or less equal divide between Android and iOS operating systems, with a slightly larger market share going to Android but iOS capturing a healthy 45% of the market. This shows the immense popularity of Apple's iPhone, which tends to be purchased by higher income demographics and thus visitors using them tend to have higher average order values than visitors using other devices. The chart is also interesting in showing how the market is almost…

How the the Multichannel Majority varies between different sectors

Our mobile marketing statistics summary shows how mobile use has increased such that it now exceeds desktop use in many categories. Following the lead of Google and others, you now often hear marketers and designers talking about adopting a Mobile-first design approach when upgrading their websites. Many responsive designs are led by the mobile experience. This often leads to a simplified design approach which is positive for users and conversion. I was recently working on  a consulting project in the insurance sector and it was interesting to see how insurance comparison sites like Money Supermarket, Confused.com and the AA have all adopted a mobile-first design philosophy with simplified designs and reduced copy. While this is positive, I've chosen today's Chart of the Day to show that it is an over-simplification. The reality is that while smartphone use is overwhelmingly popular for some…

Mobile websites aren't just desktop sites on wheels. Plan your mobile strategy accordingly

In the latest in our series of videos with sticky marketing, Dave talks about mobile strategy and tactics. He goes over some the common mistakes marketers often make with mobile, so you can avoid them. If you can't watch the video for whatever reason, we've got a transcript for you below! Grant Leboff: Dave of course one of the biggest things that have happened in the last few years is the impact of mobile on marketing and how that's affecting the way people communicate and some of the things they have to consider when they're putting communications together. What for you are perhaps the biggest things that marketing managers, business owners have to start considering in a mobile age? Dave Chaffey: Well, yeah, certainly a massive impact, and in particular we're looking at smartphone because I think…

How to get your mobile strategy back on track

Next-generation mobile strategies depend on having a solid data strategy. Consumers have little tolerance for generic content that doesn’t speak directly to their interests, so most Fortune 500 companies have shifted toward customized experiences. Good user experiences revolve around effective personalization, and you need high-quality customer intelligence in order to provide that. Data allows you to better understand your customers, and smart data builds trust. Traditional tools such as geofencing and wireless access points, among other technologies, create a picture of people’s behaviors so you can sell to them according to their circumstances. Modern marketing strategies are adaptive, shifting as they gather more details about audiences. The way you market to someone browsing your app at home is different from how you’d approach them in your physical store. You might entice…