How long to people spend looking at your site on their phone? What are they trying to do, and is it different from when they’re a “non-mobile” visitor to your site?
A recent TechCrunch article by Jack Krawcyzk titled “Your Mobile Phone Is The Least Social Device You Own” had this graph near the opening:
Session length by Media/Device type (from a techcrunch.com article by Jack Krawcyzk)
It’s suggesting that people visiting your site on mobile only do so for a very short time compared to a “desktop” visit.
There’s a certain “well, _obviously_” simplicity in that revelation, but there’s also some consequences if it’s true[1].
On the Mightymedia website, we know from tracking webserver logs and Google Analytics that visitors are 85+% likely to be looking for one of two things – our phone number or our address. We’ve got an “About Us” and a “Services” section in our mobile site (you can see it by going directly to http://www.mightymedia.com.au/mobile even on your desktop browser), but almost nobody ever clicks those links. People hit the homepage and either click the phone number autodialling link, or go to the Contact page to see our address. (Or they bounce from the home page…) We had a mobile optimised portfolio page there for a while, and in 4 months not one person clicked it (except for us testing it and showing it off).
Your users goals when browsing your website on their phone are very likely to be extremely straightforward. They have their mobile phone in their hand, and they’re looking for information about you. It’s almost certain they want to call you or visit you. Make sure you’ve got you phone number, address, and opening hours really easy to find. That’s probably what nearly everybody is looking for on your mobile site.
Google breaks down mobile users into 3 categories: A. “Repetitive now” B. “Bored now” C. “Urgent now” (see: here). Mightymedia’s mobile website visitors are clearly all in category C “Urgent now”. You business might be different – Yellow Express (or their direct mobile site link) have “Repetitive now” clients who’re tracking parcels, SMB Interior Design ( mobile link) has quite a lot of visitors spending many minutes browsing their gallery, presumably in the “Bored now” category. But both of those still have very important contact details very prominently displayed.
Make sure you know what visitors to your mobile site are looking for, and what business goals you need them to complete. (And, as always, Mighty Media would love to help you develop your mobile website strategy, call us on 1300 050 690 to chat)
[1] The truthfulness there is not easy to measure. First thing I did was go and look in Google Analytics to see Average visit duration for mobile vs non-mobile visits across a bunch of sites. Unfortunately that doesn’t immediately show a much set of stats “proving” the assertion, with different sites and different time periods on the same site giving contradictory and inconclusive numbers. I think the problem is finding