Whether you have a landing page, a business website or an eCommerce portal, you have to do this one test.
Adobe recently published an article explaining that mobile visits will soon replace desktop visits. Not really big news if you’re paying attention. Just walk down any busy street or hang out in the mall and you’ll see a common theme. Everyone is walking around surfing the web on their phone.
There have been some extremely important shift in the last few years in the retail space. The most obvious one is, of course, the rise of people doing their shopping online instead of going to a physical store, though that is not as pronounced as you might think, accounting for 8.5 percent of all retail in the first quarter of this year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The other shift is the number of people shopping on mobile device, rather than on a desktop.
These trends are showing no signs of slowing down; in fact, they’re actually ramping up, according to the Retail Industry Report put out by Adobe, which found that not only is mobile about to become more popular than desktop for the first time ever, but that social is quickly establishing itself as an extremely important channel for marketers as well.
And as Adobe states, this is not a trend. This is not a prediction. This is happening now.
“Last year, if you followed the holiday forecast report, we had several specific days, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, where we experienced mobile traffic eclipsing desktop traffic for those particular events. We’re seeing a trend where, within the next couple of months, that will not only be a singular, one day event occurrence, but it will be just the nature of the trend,” said Klein.
Mobile search is also replacing desktop search as well. It’s an older report, but the details bear out this continuing trend.
According to official Google statements, more than 50 percent of search queries globally now come from mobile devices. But we don’t know whether the number is 51 percent or 60 percent, or if it varies significantly by country.
A recent report from Hitwise (registration required) argues that in the US mobile search is roughly 58 percent of overall search query volume. That’s based on an average of 11 key categories and associated queries analyzed by Hitwise in its “Mobile Search: Topics and Themes” report. The company “examined hundreds of millions of online search queries” across PCs, smartphones and tablets between April 10 and May 7, 2016.
So now is the time to easily find out in three easy steps to determine how your website performs in this new economy.
- Step away from your desktop/laptop computer.
- Pick up your smart phone.
- Go to your website.
Your website had better be easy to view/read. This should be done without doing the “pinch and spread” motion on your phone. The menus/buttons should be easy to navigate, again without the “pinch and spread”. You could continue to browse your site, but there’s really no need. You already know how your website looks on your phone. It either performs well or…… it doesn’t. If your site looks bad on your phone, think of your customer’s browsing experience. If your site performs poorly on your customer’s phone, they will definitely X out of your site and take their hard-earned money elsewhere.
After doing the 3-step test, and discovering that your website is not performing well on a mobile device. Give us a call. We’ll here to help.