Marketers have been debating whether mobile web or mobile apps hold more importance for reach consumers. New research finds they are both critical and actually complement each other. This comes from a recent Mobile Benchmark Report by the Adobe Digital Index. The report finds both mobile app and mobile web usage continuing to grow at steady rates. Let’s discuss what drives these trends and how to optimize your marketing to reflect them.
Mobile App vs. Mobile Web
Mobile browsing visits are up 16% YoY, and is set to replace desktop in 18 months or less. In fact, the top 20% of sites already have. Those top brands are certainly doing something right and experiencing the resulting benefits resulting from increased mobile connections with consumers. While mobile web growth is impressive, mobile app growth has been explosive. Since last year, mobile app launches have grown an incredible 51%. The disparate growth is due to why consumers use apps versus mobile web. Apps are great for checking your bank account or social media accounts, but mobile web certainly has its place for activities such as location searches and product research.
It’s important to understand that mobile generally means smartphone. The vast majority of mobile activity occurs on a smartphone as opposed to a tablet, with smartphones accounting for 72% of web visits and 82% of app launches. This is because smartphones are seen as primary devices and are always within arm’s reach. Marketers should focus their efforts more heavily on how they can provide an excellent smartphone experience for their visitors. This means that you have to make it easy for smartphones to do what they do best – call your business.
Where Is This Mobile Web Traffic Coming From?
The ADI report found that nearly 3 out of 10 website visits result from a web search or a social media source. This is an impressive number considering the variety of ways someone can wind up on your website such as email, text messages, and other referring apps. This makes it absolutely crucial to optimize your mobile presence for both social and search. You need to be able to track your web visitors, as well as their resulting conversions, back to the sources from which they originated.
Understanding Where Mobile Conversions Occur and How to Optimize for Them
The report also found that mobile conversions occur at a very low rate. On smartphones, app users convert at 1.2% per visit and web browsers convert at 1.0%. However, this only accounts for online conversions and leaves out the huge portion of conversions that occur offline.
The problem is many marketers don’t have the ability to track a crucial conversion path for smartphones – phone calls. In order to gain complete attribution for things like Facebook ads, keywords, and paid search ads you need call attribution. This allows you to capture all of those valuable conversions that take place offline and attribute them back to your marketing efforts in order to prove ROI.
Mobile has certainly become a crucial part of any marketing plan and it’s clear you need to have a strong mobile presence. This is where consumers go to learn about your company, reach out to you, and even make purchases. To learn more about how you can optimize your mobile presence, watch our webinar: The New Mobile Rules for Search, Social, and Display.
