As a cataloger, you need to prepared to continually overcome the ongoing changes in eCommerce and grow your business through a successful mobile strategy. Learning about mobile commerce trends, how to better position your business to a growing mobile audience, and how to provide excellent user experience design will take your cataloging business to the next level. By the end of this article you will have a better understanding of mobile commerce trends, why you should develop a mobile strategy, and what a mobile strategy visually looks like. Included at the bottom of the article is a slideshow of key mobile strategy takeaways.
Mobile Commerce Trends
A mobile strategy is not something to start considering in the future for catalogers ….now is the time. In June 2012 Google announced a strong preference to responsive web design. Websites that do not have responsive design capabilities typically get site errors when being viewed through mobile browsers. Site errors affecting mobile visitors will negatively affect your organic and paid rankings for mobile searches. Websites that do not have responsive design capabilities can use multiple URLs that direct users to a landing page designed for either mobile or desktop users. This causes Google’s crawlers to digest multiple pages that have the same information. Having a single URL for your web pages make it easier for your users to interact with the page and allow Google’s algorithms to assign higher indexing properties to your content.
Mobile Traffic vs. Mobile Revenue Gap
A sample business, without a proper mobile strategy, receives 45% of their traffic from mobile devices, but only 7% of their revenue from mobile transactions. There is a major growth opportunity for B2B eCommerce if your company can leverage key mobile strategies. There are a few questions you should be asking yourself this year:
- Is your company responding to your mobile traffic appropriately?
- Is your online store poised to take advantage of this shift in traffic?
Non-Mobile Site Visits & Revenue
Mobile traffic is providing a disproportionately low volume of revenue compared to visits. Launching a mobile site doesn’t guarantee that the ratio will be even, but we shouldn’t see a gap this large. You need to check your own ratios and then compare them with your historical data. Variance between sites and core demographics can be quite large. Several of our non-mobile clients with younger demographics, between 20 and 40 years old, show disparities much larger than what you see here.
Across these non-mobile sites, an analysis for January 2012 vs. January 2013 shows that mobile visits and revenue have increased by 225% and 435% respectively. The growth in visits & revenue starting in October 2012 is directly related to the holiday season and we would see a similar trend, starting at about the same time, for desktops. However, what’s especially interesting to note is that mobile phone traffic did not decline after the holidays at the same rate that we typically see with desktops. In fact, desktop traffic declined by -45% between January and August 2013, whereas mobile traffic declined by only -25%.
Mobile Visitors vs. Non-Mobile Visitors
You might be asking yourself, ”If mobile traffic & revenue is increasing at this rate on non-mobile sites, what’s the point of spending money to go mobile?” You can clearly see that both conversion rate and bounce rate substantially suffer on non-mobile sites. We are sure most of you are familiar with the definition of conversion rate, but maybe not bounce rate. Bounce rate is defined as a single page view. In other words, the visitor wasn’t interested enough by your site to view a second page. They either used the back button or closed the window. Had these retailers been mobile for Holiday 2012, they undoubtedly would have seen even larger growth.
Responsive Design Performance
There’s no question that performance varies by mobile device category. As you see here, the volume of mobile phone visits is +68% higher than tablets, yet the number of orders from phones is -30% lower. Tablet traffic behaves more like desktop traffic. Google stated this loud & clear in July with the introduction of “Enhanced Campaigns” in AdWords, their PPC platform. Enhanced campaigns force us to lump tablet and desktop targeting together. We’re no longer able to segment them.
Non-Mobile Pages-Per-Visits & Time-On-Site
As you can see, substantial differences exist in browsing behavior across desktops, tablets and mobile phones. Mobile phone pages-per-visit is -45% below desktops and time-on-site is -28% below desktops. Again, tablets behave more closely to desktops than they do to mobile phones. They’re not equal, but the variance isn’t as large.
Non-Mobile Pay Per Click
Site configuration has become much more important in paid search, especially with the mandatory migration to Enhanced Campaigns in July. We can still eliminate phone targeting, but not tablets. But…if we eliminate mobile phone targeting in our PPC programs because we don’t have a mobile site, on average we are missing 30% of our potential customers. If we continue to target mobile phones with a non-mobile site, we’re going to pay for it either by paying higher click costs or by forfeiting potential revenue. As you saw earlier, mobile device conversion rate, time-on-site and pages-per-visit all suffer on non-mobile sites and therefore so does our quality score. For the sites we analyzed, cost-per-transaction on phones is 285% higher than desktops and the ad cost to sales ratio is 300% higher.
Mobile Devices & The Conversion Funnel
The role mobile devices play in the conversion funnel isn’t crystal clear to us just yet. Today’s Google Analytics tracks visits, not visitors, and therefore we cannot easily piece together touch points across devices. However, in March Google released a new solution called Universal Analytics, which will help us more easily understand how unique visitors interact with our site. Our point here is that we know visitors interact with us multiple times before completing a transaction, but without Universal Analytics installed we cannot easily stich those interactions together if they occur on different devices.
When To Plan Your Mobile Strategy
If your company doesn’t have a mobile strategy in place, the time to start is now. Early adopters were thinking about mobile years ago. The early adopters have been capturing and converting mobile traffic for years. In modern day commerce, mobile optimized eCommerce platforms are commonplace. The barrier to entry has been lowered and new businesses can come online with a lot of powerful tools that many established brands are not taking advantage of. This causes an obvious problem for well-established businesses: competitive advantage is weakening if the mobile audience is ignored. The more time that passes, the lower the barrier gets to oncoming competition.
What An Effective Mobile Strategy Looks Like
People love things that make life easier, and good eCommerce user experience is no exception. Providing your customers with an exceptional user experience is the key to turning your online store into a customer loyalty and conversion machine. The unique user-focused design in a site treats the mobile buyer like a welcomed shopper rather than an afterthought.
What Your Company Should Do Next
Determining the Key Performance Indicators for your eCommerce business is very important. KPIs like number of transactions, average order values, total revenue, and percent of growth are the most prominent and general, but digging into your online business can result in specific and target-driven KPIs. Your current business may not support mobile in an ideal fashion at this time, but learning where and what is lacking is important. A user interface analysis can bring a clear understanding of what is needed and what needs to happen in the near term. Make it easy for visitors with a mobile device. Make their experience fluid, inviting, and easy. Desktop websites on a 5 inch screen is hard on the eyes, it’s punishing.
EYEMAGINE is an eCommerce innovator. We build scalable, durable, and beautifully designed eCommerce experiences. Some of the worlds largest brands trust us to raise eCommerce sales, drive eCommerce conversions, and enhance eCommerce user experience. Contact us today for eCommerce design, development, and support.
