Are You Ready for the Mobile Web? Five Questions Answered.
We’ve been getting a lot of interest these days about mobile web sites. People generally have the following questions in some form or fashion:
Question #1: What exactly is a mobile web site?
Answer: A mobile web site is simply a set of web pages on your current web server that are optimized for mobile devices. Usually the mobile-optimized pages contain a subset of content and functionality from the corporate site that would be most applicable to mobile users. They should be designed to load fast and have very clear navigation that will help mobile users get quickly to the content they’re seeking.
Once your mobile-optimized site is ready for launch, we can put a small piece of code on your web server that will automatically detect mobile devices and redirect them to the mobile-optimized site.
Question #2: How many people are actually using their phones to view web sites?
Answer: According to a recent study done by Merkle Inc., about half of all mobile subscribers have Internet-enabled phones. Of course, adoption varies quite a bit by age group. According to Merkle, the percentage of mobile subscribers who own an internet enabled phone in the various age groups breaks down like this:
- 18 – 29 : 53%
- 30 – 39 : 59%
- 40 – 49 : 53%
- 50 – 64 : 44%
- 65+ : 30%
Additionally, the report goes on to say that 40% of subscribers with Internet-enabled phones access the Web via their phones daily. So, today, if the majority of your site visitors are under the age of 65, there is a compelling argument to seriously consider mobile web marketing.
Then, when you consider the rapid growth in the space, (AdMob’s monthly metric report for February 2010 showed a 193% increase in smart phone traffic when compared to February 2009.) it makes even more sense to try and figure out if a mobile site would be beneficial.
Question #3: How do I find out if my visitors are currently using mobile devices to access my web site?
Answer: Look at your web site analytics data. If you don’t have any analytics data you need to get some. (I will take this opportunity to suggest Google Analytics – free, easy and full of data.) Any basic analytics package should provide you with the number of visitors who accessed your site via a mobile device. I would suggest looking at a time period of at least three or four months. In the below graphs from a couple of our clients (names have been removed), I have started on Jan. 1, 2010 through May 15, 2010.
The three high-level things I look for in this report are:
- number of mobile visits over a given time period
- growth trend in visits (from highest to lowest)
- percentage of mobile visitors compared to overall site visitors
If you would like a quick tutorial on how to run these reports, check out this mobile web metrics blog post on the Monkee-Boy blog.
Question #4: Can’t most new smart phones view my current site as-is anyway?
Answer: Yes they can, however, most current sites are designed for desktops with large screen resolutions with flash plugins, etc. Usability expert, Jakob Nielsen, spells out the four main usability challenges for mobile users:
- Small screens
- Awkward input, especially for typing
- Download delays
- Mis-designed sites.
Nielsen goes on to say:
When our test participants used sites that were designed specifically for mobile devices, their success rate averaged 64%, which is substantially higher than the 53% recorded for using “full” sites — that is, the same sites that desktop users see.
Improving user performance by 1/5 is reason enough to create mobile-optimized sites. Such sites were also more pleasant to use and thus received higher subjective satisfaction ratings. This fact offers an additional rationale: When users are successful and satisfied, they’re likely to come back. So, if mobile use is important to your Internet strategy, it’s smart to build a dedicated mobile site.
Question #5: What content should I put on my mobile site?
Answer: Similar to traditional web sites, content is the area where mobile site projects start to derail. Some people want a lot of advanced functionality, others want to pull all of the same content from the corporate web site into a mobile-optimized template and present it all. In the same usability study above, Nielsen discusses content:
…you should scale back the mobile site’s functionality and focus on features that people are actually likely to use in a mobile scenario. Users repeatedly told us that they don’t want to do tasks on their mobiles that involve heavy interaction or in-depth information perusal.
The best way to develop your web-optimized content plan is to start with your web site analytics. Look at your most popular content report to see what most people are looking for on your site. You can even cross-reference the report against your visitors who use mobile operating systems. Write down the top pages that show up on both reports and look at the pages on your desktop to see how the content can be pared down for smaller mobile pages. Additionally, try to remove as many technical barriers as possible to get to the information — simplify or eliminate search forms wherever you can. Simple navigation, links and concise copy should be the goal for each page.
So are you ready to go mobile? Let us help you for Free.
Monkee-Boy is giving away a free ten-page mobile site to one of our subscribers (or their friends/clients). Simply complete the information form by June 11, 2010 and we will select a company for the project. Be forewarned that the more complete your entry, the more likely you’ll be to win (and some of the questions on the form are covered in this article). That company’s site and project overview will be featured in the next issue of our quarterly newsletter.
