Go Mobile (Friendly) or Go Home
The mobile revolution has overtaken the desktop and there is no turning back. According to Google, in October of 2016 the number of searches made from mobile devices outnumbered the desktop, 51.3% to 48.7%. That number is expected to grow to over 60% by 2020. As a company looking at digital marketing, it will be especially important to tailor your marketing plan to account for this growth.
Google has already changed their SEO ranking to account for the fact that more than half of the internet searches are on mobile devices. If your site is not responsive and optimized for mobile consumption, then you’re SEO ranking is dropping. You can take a mobile friendly check-up from Google, by going to https://search.google.com/search-console/mobile-friendly and entering your website’s URL. Google will quickly tell you whether your site is mobile-friendly and you can open a site wide mobile usability report just to verify there are no errors on other pages in your site.
With all this in mind, we thought it might be good to see some of the mobile use statistics that re-enforces the need for your digital marketing to this shift in the way people are using the internet to search, review and purchase from businesses like yours.
15 Astounding Mobile Device Statistics
- More than 3 billion people worldwide now use the internet (Time), and 80 percent of them access it from smartphones (Smart Insights).
- Of the 1.8 hours the average user spends online on their smartphones each day, mobile apps account for 89 percent of this media time (Social Media Today).
- 79% of people surveyed use their smartphone for reading email — a higher percentage than those who used it for making calls. (Email Monday)
- 88% of consumers who search for a type of local business on a mobile device call or go to that business within 24 hours. (Nectafy)
- The average smartphone owner uses 2.9 GB of data every month (Time).
- 37% of all website visits come from mobile devices (StatCounter).
- Tablet devices account for the highest add-to-cart rates on e-commerce websites at 8.58%. (Smart Insights)
- Google says 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead. (McKinsey & Company)
- 57% of users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site. (CMS Report)
- By 2019, mobile advertising will represent 72% of all US digital ad spending. (Marketing Land)
- Mobile Offers are Redeemed 10x More Frequently Than Print Offers (eMarketer)
- 75% of Gmail users access their accounts on mobile devices. Gmail now has 900 million users. (TechCrunch)
- Mobile ads are primed to represent 72 percent of US ad spending within the next three years (eMarketer).
- 18% of Americans use mobile payments (Fortune).
- 75% of store shoppers use their mobile devices while shopping in-store and 25% of store shoppers who use their mobile devices in stores make a purchase on their mobile devices while in-store. (Internet Retailer)
The statistics above help show that internet access on mobile-friendly devices is the future. As a business owner, you cannot afford to ignore this huge area of internet marketing. If your website isn’t already mobile-ready (responsive), then it needs to be in the very near future. If you don’t have a digital marketing plan that includes mobile responsive devices, then you need to take some time and strategize the best way to include it in your marketing plan.