Your Website’s Mobile Visitors

Have you checked your mobile traffic recently?

Last year at this time, most of the websites we take care of were seeing about 5% of their visits coming via mobile devices. Now, we’re seeing everywhere from  8% to 31%.

So the first suggestion about mobile traffic is this: don’t assume you know how much of your traffic is mobile if you haven’t checked lately. You might be surprised.

How can you check? Go to Google Analytics and look under Audience>Technology>Mobile. You’ll see the percentage of your visits that come from mobile devices.

You can also see the kinds of devices people are using. In the example below, you can see that the iPad is the most common device used, followed by a variety of phones and the iPod:

You should also have a look at the Visitor Flow for mobile. Just go to Visitor Flow and choose Mobile from the drop-down list of Default Segments:

You’ll see the visitor flow for just your mobile customers; compare it with the visitor flow overall to see how your mobile visitors interact with your website.

This information will let you answer not only the first question, do you have significant mobile traffic, but also the second important question: are your mobile visitors different from the majority of your visitors? Do they seem to be interested in different things? Do they find your website differently from the non-mobile visitors?

Having answered these questions, you should check your website on the mobile devices that are most often being used to visit. If you see lots of phone visits, try Google’s site tester. Otherwise, try to observe someone visiting your site on the most common devices. You can visit yourself, of course, but your experience of your website will never be the same as the experience of your typical visitor.