4 Insights for Business about Mobile Devices from Google Anaytics

And it’s no surprise, what with Google’s recent report stating that over half of Americans have a smart phone and are using it to search locally. Yet, 79% of large online advertisers do not have a mobile optimized site.

Still not convinced that your site should be mobile? Try looking up these 4 pieces of data in your Google Analytics account for motivation.

Percent of Total Traffic

Probably the single most motivating piece of information is the percentage of your site's traffic that is coming from mobile devices. To find this tidbit, go to Audience > Mobile > Devices and the percentage of total traffic will be in the upper left-hand corner.

As a rule of thumb, anything above 10% is a clear indicator that you are receiving a significant amount of mobile traffic and that it would be profitable to invest in a mobile site or mobile landing pages at the very least.

 Types of Mobile Devices

Still not convinced? In that same set of information, you can see exactly what types of mobile devices are accessing your site. Apple iPad traffic is growing exponentially.

While a non-mobile site may still be usable on a tablet, consider that these users can be accessing your site on slower WiFi connections than a desktop and their conversion intent is still that of a mobile user.

If you see a lot of mobile phones accessing your site, you should definitely be using click-to-call buttons and links to open their Google Map native application.

Time on Site

Did you know that 80 percent of consumers immediately quit their shopping if they have a bad experience on mobile devices? If you examine the average time on site (still found under the Audience > Mobile > Devices), you can immediately tell if mobile users are engaging with your site.

As I’ve hinted earlier, mobile users have different conversion intent than desktop users. After looking up a local business on their smart phone, 61% of users call the business and 59% visited the store. Therefore, we can assume that mobile users are primarily looking for a quick and easy way to call your business and find directions to your store. Those calls-to-action should take up more screen real estate than a description about your company’s history or profile of the CEO.

Keywords

So what exactly are mobile users searching for when they end up on your site?

Go to Advertising > AdWords > Keywords and apply the Mobile Traffic advanced segment to find out. Are they primarily searching just for the name of your business? Are there specific products they’re looking for? What general terms bring them to your site? And, most importantly, do you have landing pages optimized for mobile devices that target these keywords?

Pay special attention to search queries with local intent. You’d be surprised how much more popular a different set of keywords can be on mobile devices than on desktop computers.