Mobile Commerce

14 Essential Tactics for Mobile: Email, Search and Social Media Marketing

Mobify powers over 20,000 mobile websites and reaches over 20% of the smartphone subscribers on the planet.

So we have a lot of data about what works in mobile marketing.

Add that original data to great additional sources and we have a pretty good view what works in mobile marketing.

So we wrote an e-book on the topic, broken into the following chapters:

• 6 tips for making mobile email work
• 4 critical ways mobile search is different
• 4 tactics for mobile social media sharing

The e-book is now available for free download as a PDF.

Get it by clicking here:

14 Essential Tactics for Mobile: Email, Search and Social Media Marketing

Mobile performance benchmarks: How does your mobile performance measure up?

The mobile web is driving a wave of change that has left many businesses – especially retailers and publishers – wondering how to cope with this new, tangible connection between the real and digital worlds.

Smartphones are everywhere and connected online and they’re only growing in use and penetration. According to Morgan Stanley, mobile traffic is projected to surpass desktop traffic by 2015.

Mobile web growth overtakes desktop web use in 2014.

Mobile’s increasing importance and influence on the future of commerce means companies need to start learning mobile lessons today so they can create mobile strategies for the long term.

In order to learn those lessons and optimize for mobile users, it’s critical to:

1. Understand which mobile metrics to collect
2. Correlate those mobile metrics with your desktop metrics (from visits to your website from traditional desktop PCs)
3. Build your own mobile performance benchmarks to compare with industry standards

1. Which mobile metrics to collect?

To understand what metrics to collect, we started with the most popular analytics tracking software, Google Analytics, and the recommendations of Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik.

By default Google Analytics starts with eight common metrics across its dashboards: Visits, Unique visitors, Pageviews, Pages per visit, Time on site, Bounce rate, Conversion rate and Average order size.

Avinash Kaushik then recommends more sophistication in understanding these 8 common metrics. He organizes them into 3 groups that reflect the high-level purchase or conversion process of a web visitor: Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversion.

To make it simple to remember, Kaushik calls these metrics groups the ABCs of web analytics.

• Acquisition metrics are Visits, Unique visitors and Pageviews.
• Behaviour metrics are Pages per visit, Time on site and Bounce rate.
• Conversion metrics are Conversion rate and Average order size.

Collecting these common metrics is the starting point for learning the lessons your mobile visitors are teaching you. But these metrics don’t occur in a vacuum and they can be best understood in comparison and correlation with desktop metrics.

2. Understanding mobile metrics vs. desktop metrics and building a variance model

The best way to understand mobile metrics is to start with a set of familiar metrics – desktop metrics – and then compare them to mobile metrics with a variance model.

A variance model in this context is a great way to compare the metrics collected from the 2 main ways people visit your website: on their desktop PC and on their mobile smartphone.

The following variance model was built from over 25-million combined mobile and desktop visits between September and December 2011, sampled from a selection of over 18,000 mobile sites powered by Mobify.

With that large data set we see overall patterns and start to draw observations about the difference and sameness of traffic on desktop versus traffic on mobile, using the same 8 common metrics.

1. Acquisition metrics: The first three metrics – Visits, Unique Visitors, and Pageviews – track user acquisition from various sources and represent the top end of the conversion funnel.

• These metrics show how many people are visiting the websites on desktop versus on mobile.
• 78% of visits are on desktop, 22% on mobile
• 79% of unique visitors are on desktop, 21% on mobile
• 84% of pageviews are on desktop, 16% are on mobile

Desktop is the most prominent way to visit these websites and people visiting on a desktop view slightly more pages. No surprises here. The most interesting tracking we can do in acquisition metrics is in changes over time:

• Is mobile traffic growing on your site?
• Is overall traffic growing on your site?
• How is the ratio of mobile to desktop traffic changing?

2. Behavior metrics: The second three metrics – Pages / Visit, Time on Site, and Bounce Rate – track user behavior on a site and provide insight into whether the site is moving them towards the outcomes it’s built to achieve.

When we compare what people are doing on the desktop site vs. mobile, we see:

• Visitors on desktop go slightly deeper than visitors on mobile, and consequently stay longer on the site.
• Visitors on mobile are slightly more likely to bounce off the site, visiting only one page and then leaving.

These results seem intuitively correct as desktop visitors are likely seated somewhere working while visitors on mobile could be in many different user modes, settings and contexts.

Google has an excellent framework for understanding user modes on mobile. They classify people on mobile into the following 3 broad modes of interaction:

1. Repetitive now – tracking information on an ongoing basis that’s time sensitive like stock quotes or sports scores.
2. Bored now – seeking distraction or entertainment while waiting, such as standing in line at the bank or on public transit.
3. Urgent now – needing information about a specific situation that’s likely location-sensitive like nearest pizza restaurant or movie showtimes.

Understand the mode your visitor is in on your site can help shed light on behavior metrics and how you ought to be addressing them over time. For example, a Board Now visitor wants entertainment and a longer Time on site indicates greater satisfaction of that need. In contrast, a Repetitive now visitor may have a high bounce rate, short Time on site and few number of Pages / visit and see that as a very successful interaction.

3. Conversion metrics: The last two metrics – Conversion Rate and Average Order Size – track user conversions and the value of each of those conversions. These numbers are for e-commerce sites and show how visitors on both desktop and mobile contribute to the bottom line.

It’s interesting to note that visitors on desktop convert at more than double the rate of visitors on mobile yet visitors on mobile have a slightly larger average order size than visitors on desktop.

What can we learn from this?

The fact that visitors on desktop still convert at a higher rate than visitors on mobile isn’t surprising. Mobile web purchasing is relatively new and habits take time to be established.

In addition, the mobile device is often used as an interface to digital data while shopping in the physical world. A recently Google study found that 79% of shoppers use their mobile device to shop with 70% of them using it in store.

And the velocity of purchases where a consumer is aided by a mobile device are significantly faster. Microsoft research found that shoppers who research products on their mobile devices are ready to buy, with 70% of them taking action within an hour, versus 70% of people on desktop PCs taking action taken within a week.

The slightly larger (by $1.73) average order size on mobile can be attributed to a number of factors but in reality is so close to the Average order size on desktop that you ought to treat them as equal, unless you find a big difference in your specific situation.

Looking at these A-B-Cs provides a good snapshot of how a mobile website attracts customers, moves them to consider an action, and finally gets them to complete a desired action. The final step is building your own mobile benchmarks and comparing them to the industry standards.

3. Build your own mobile benchmarks

To build your own benchmarks for success on mobile, refer to the table below using the same eight metrics organized into A-B-Cs and with the Mobile Variance Ratio in the centre column.

Add in your desktop numbers for each of the metrics and multiply by the Mobile Variance Ratio to find the Mobile Web Benchmarks for your own website.

(With Time on site, you will have to convert a blended measure of minutes and seconds into a single measurement of seconds.)

Use our Mobile ROI Predictor, an online tool that automates the calculations in the table above.

How do your numbers stack up?

More importantly, how do they stack up over time and how does that tell you how well you’re succeeding within the framework of your overall mobile strategy?

Track these metrics on an ongoing basis, make adjustments to your desktop site, your mobile site and your marketing and watch for changes.

As with any business initiative, ‘micro metrics’ like the eight listed above are to be used for tracking and tuning your program. Yet, it should be the ‘macro metrics’ of sales, orders, revenues and profits that drive your overall strategy and focus.

Measure the micro and make decisions on the macro. But make sure to start measuring as soon as possible – today is as good a day as any to start.

Adoption of the mobile web is on a rapid growth trajectory. Once you start tracking your common 8 metrics you’ll start to see how that rapid growth affects your website and your business.

You’ll be able to compare it to industry standards like those found above in the Mobile Variance Model. You’ll have data to build and refine a long-term strategy aimed at leading your competitors and serving your customers.

So start with tracking your mobile performance benchmarks. A handy feature in Google Analytics (and most other analytics software) is to have summary reports emailed to you on a regular basis. Start getting them on a weekly basis and spending at least half an hour a week listening to what your visitors are telling you.

They’re speaking loudly with their clicks and their dollars and now you’re armed to hear them.

Mobile Stats: 57% of Mobile Posting on Facebook from Mobile Web

One of the discussions we often get invited to contribute to with clients is a discussion on their mobile strategy.

What’s the right thing for them to do: mobile apps or mobile web?

Each client has their own situation, customer needs, goals and context. A blog post won’t do justice to answering the full question.

But this blog post seeks to provide some data on how people use the largest website in the world with their mobile devices.

Using data gathered by Dan Zarrella in his strong post New Data: 33% of Facebook Posting is Mobile, we broke down the 33% of mobile traffic posting to Facebook a little further to see how they were accessing Facebook.

(Click for full size image.)

According to the 70,000 samples Dan gathered, mobile web contributes 57% of the mobile posts to Facebook. All apps combined contribute 43%.

So when we hear rumors of Facebook’s Project Spartan now we can start to see the reasoning behind the investment and direction towards a full HTML 5 version of Facebook.

Reading into the numbers, I think we can guess that Facebook see mobile web’s popularity today and they also see a dominant future for the mobile web.

So while apps are part to their mobile strategy, the mobile web is essential.

(Thanks to Darren Barefoot for the coffee and conversation that spurred this post.)