Mobile Profits and The Futureof Internet Marketing

by Jonathan Leger

www.LearnFromJon.com

It's a ridiculously obvious statement to say that mobile devices are everywhere. “Smart”, powerful devices that make it easy to access your work or research your purchases or make purchases from anywhere at any time.

But what are people actually doing with all of these mobile devices, and do their actions warrant you accommodating their smaller screens on your website? This report will answer both of those questions.

First let's talk about the what. What are people using their mobile devices for? Here's a chart from comScore that lays it out for us:

Page 1 of 6 Mobile Profits and the Future of Internet Marketing www.LearnFromJon.com

The above chart shows the point at which mobile use of the Internet, in minutes, finallysurpassed Internet usage on desktop computers. So it's official: people are “online” more using their mobile devices than they are with their desktop computers.

But that's only a small part of the story. Notice where most of that Internet usage came from: apps. The blue line in that chart, the line that surpassed desktop usage, was for mobile apps – not mobile web browsers. Desktop browser usage is still far, far above mobile browser usage. It's clear that mobile users would rather use an app than their browser to access the content that they want.

What content is it that these mobile users are after, you ask? We have another handy chart from comScore which makes that clear:

Page 2 of 6 Mobile Profits and the Future of Internet Marketing www.LearnFromJon.com

Game apps take up about one-third of mobile Internet usage (yes you old fogey, all games are Internet-connected these days and many let you interact with and compete with other online players—but I only know this because of my kids, so I guess that makes me a fogey too).

Facebook takes up another 18% of people's time. Then entertainment, etc.

In fact, if you add up the time spent with games, Facebook, entertainment, social networking, news and “other”, you get 72%. Seventy-two percent of all time spent on mobile devices has little to do with anything productive or buyer-oriented.

That makes the picture a little more clear. Are people researching purchases on their phones? Absolutely! But the great majority of the time they spend on their devices is not with that in mind. Only 20% of their time is spent in a web browser, and who knowshow much of that time is geared toward other non-buyer activities.

So does your site need to cater to mobile users or not? Hold on a second. I'm getting to that. Take a look at this chart:

Page 3 of 6 Mobile Profits and the Future of Internet Marketing www.LearnFromJon.com

In the chart on the previous page, we see that about half of mobile users begin researching their purchases using search engines (mostly Google). Another third start on branded websites, and 26% use branded apps.

We can't get traffic from other people's branded websites or apps, so of course what we care about is the buyers who are using the search engines on their mobile devices. We have a chance at some of that traffic.

Google's search results are being modified for mobile users now. Google favors mobile-friendly pages in the mobile results. They have even begun to email webmasters whose pages are not mobile-friendly to warn them that their pages may not show in mobile search results because of it. There's no doubt that trend will continue.

So if you want a piece of the mobile pie, your site needs to be mobile-friendly. How do you know if Google thinks a page is mobile-friendly? Simple: you ask them.

Why is Google so serious about catering to mobile users? Because mobile devices are set to drive 50% of Google's paid ad clicks by the end of 2015. With 50% of their ad clicks coming from mobile, Google wants to make mobile users happy.

That's significant, because we already saw that desktop web browser usage was much higher than mobile web browser usage, but if 50% of Google ad clicks are coming from mobile devices by the end of 2015 that means that a lot of the searches on Google are coming from mobile devices.

In fact, Google's own Matt Cutts himself made it clear that this was the case.

So your answer is: yes, you want your site to cater to mobile users.

In fact, if you're currently ranking well in Google but your pages are not mobile-friendly,you can expect that in time you will lose those rankings on mobile devices and a huge chunk of your traffic from Google will go away.

How much would that matter, though? Do people actually do a lot of purchasing on their mobile devices, or is it all for research purposes?

I've got a chart for that, too. It's on the next page.

Page 4 of 6 Mobile Profits and the Future of Internet Marketing www.LearnFromJon.com

As you can see, people do buy directly from their mobile devices (especially tablets). Conversion rates from smart phones are a lot lower, but they still happen. So you're definitely losing direct buyers if you're not catering to mobile devices. If you've ever had to make a purchase on a phone from a site that is not mobile-friendly, you know how frustrating that experience can be. Definitely a conversion rate killer.

But even when people don't buy from their mobile devices (especially phones), they arestill doing research into what they will buy when they get home to their bigger device or desktop computer. You want them to want to buy from you when they get home, and that means making sure your web site caters to them.

Page 5 of 6 Mobile Profits and the Future of Internet Marketing www.LearnFromJon.com

According to an article at SearchEngineLand.com, there are about 2 billion desktop computers in the world but more than 5 billion mobile devices. So it's clear which way the numbers are going to skew. More and more people are getting comfortable buying from their mobile devices. You need to get comfortable with offering purchases of yourproducts from those devices as well.

One last important point I want to make: remember how much of the mobile time was spent in social-media apps? About 24%, with 18% of that time spent on Facebook.

Want to get more visitors and customers to your site? Then I strongly suggest you take a look at Facebook ads. I'm using Facebook ads to great effect, and I can tell you that the click-through rates on mobile devices are much higher than on the desktop Facebook website. That smaller screen makes your ads stand out a lot more.

Let me toss even more of my personal experience into the mix. I market primarily to theSearch Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing niches, and a full one third of the people who open my emails are using mobile devices to do so. I discovered this after creating my own autoresponder software that actually gives me all of that information.

While all of my content sites based on Wordpress have been mobile-friendly for a very long time, my sales pages for the Internet Marketing and SEO tools and services I have were not. After looking at the statistics from my own site visitors, it's clear that I need to cater to mobile device users in every aspect of my business. I am therefore having mobile templates created for all of my products and services.

I hope I've clearly answered the two questions that I set out to answer in this report: What are people actually doing with their mobile devices, and do their actions warrant you accommodating their smaller screens on your website?

The answers are: they are goofing off a lot, sure, but they are also searching a lot and buying a lot.

So yes, you absolutely need to make sure your sites accommodate mobile devices.

Here's to your mobile success!

Jonthan Legerwww.LearnFromJon.com

Page 6 of 6 Mobile Profits and the Future of Internet Marketing www.LearnFromJon.com