What You Need to Know About Mobile Traffic

I am young enough to be considered tech savvy and old enough to remember the pre-internet Bulletin Board Services or BBS. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s not important. What is important is the change in technology and the human interaction I have been witness to.
The grandest change since the beginning 2012 is the growth of the smart phone and tablet devices. As of November 2013 mobile devices consisted of 28% of ALL web traffic. Up 67% in just 1 year. The trend line estimates that as of March 2014 mobile devices are already over 35% of ALL web traffic.

What’s this mean to you? If your website is not mobile compatible, more than 1/3 of your potential customers are NOT buying from you.

The amount of time and money people are spending on mobile devices is growing rapidly and yet most businesses are not serving these people — at what cost?

By the numbers, mobile traffic makes up 10% of global internet traffic and next year more people will use mobile phones than PCs to get online. Purchases made on mobile devices exceeded $6.7 billion in the U.S. last year, or about 8% of total online sales. This is expected to nearly double to $11.6 billion this year. By 2015, U.S. mobile sales are forecast to reach $31 billion.

How much of that could be yours?

If you haven’t optimized your website for mobile, you are frustrating visitors with tricky navigation and slow loading times. If you have an ecommerce site, those figures should help you benchmark what you’re already losing in dollars, but a recent survey from Google underlines the damage you might also be doing to your brand by not having your site optimized for mobile.

The survey, which tallied responses from 1,088 U.S. adult smartphone owners, found that:

• Mobile sites lead to mobile purchases. Well duh! Shoppers are more likely to buy a product or service if your site is optimized for mobile. Three-fourths said they are more likely to return to a site in the future if the experience on mobile is good.

• If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, shoppers will go elsewhere. The majority of participants in the survey said that if they can’t find what they’re looking for on your site, they’ll sooner seek out a competitor’s mobile-friendly site instead of switching to a PC to revisit yours.

• A bad mobile experience can damage a company’s brand. A bad mobile experience can create bad feelings about your company. Yes, a bad feeling about your company! Nearly half of participants in the survey said they feel frustrated and annoyed when they visit a site that’s not mobile-ready. It makes them feel like a you don’t care about your business.

If you need help getting your site mobile ready, we have been doing just that for companies in Sacramento, Chico, Redding and the San Francisco Bay area, plus some recent revisions for Ag websites in Texas.

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