Mobile Traffic is Up

Mobile website traffic is up. While this is hardly news, as a small case study I'm posting findings from metaltoad.com (you can see the exact numbers in the tables below). Here's the most important information I gleaned from our mobile analysis:

1. Mobile traffic for us is approaching 4% (By comparison for emmys.com it's 7.5%). This is a 3 fold increase from 12 months ago.
2. Time on the site for a mobile user is about 1/3 of the time from a traditional web user, but average pageviews is only about 20% less then traditional. Are they consuming more content faster or just skimming?
3. Mobile users are spending 20% less time on our site then last year (2010). Traditional web browsing time on site remains constant.

Looking back further into 2009, mobile traffic is virtually non-existent (0 visits) or Google Analytics didn't provide tracking for mobile clients.

I am predicting a significant uptick in mobile traffic this year, so we'll be investing in a more mobile friendly site. For us and for other business that are looking to tailor their sites to mobile traffic it's important that they are paying attention to:

1. Where is the mobile traffic coming from?
2. What are mobile users looking at?

I'll be posting more information on that and the exact makeup of our mobile traffic in a future post.

Feb 2011 Statistics for metaltoad.com

Mobile	Traditional	Total	Mobile %
Visitors	408	10,022	10,430	3.91%
Pageviews	507	15,703	16,210	3.13%
Avg. Pageviews	1.24	1.55	-	-
Time on Site	0:23	1:10	-	-

Feb 2010 Statistics for metaltoad.com

Mobile	Traditional	Total	Mobile %
Visitors	78	5,686	5,764	1.35%
Pageviews	114	10,725	10,839	1.05%
Avg. Pageviews	1.46	1.88	-	-
Time on Site	0:29	1:10	-	-