A benchmark study of 20 Dutch websites reveals that in the past six months the amount of visits originating from mobile devices has doubled. The study shows that in May 2011 4.3% of total website visits was generated by mobile devices. Six months ago, in November 2010, the observed average for the same sites was 2.16%. If the growth continues at this rate, it is expected that in the first half of 2012 this will be more than 10%. Smartphones, tablets and mobile music players are considered ‘mobile devices’ in this study.

The biggest growth is detected in the use of the Apple iPad and Android phones. On average, the iPad has a 38% share in mobile visits, in November 2010 this was 28%. For phones using the Android operating system, the share in the mobile visits grew from 12.5% in November 2010 to 18% in May 2011.
The top 5 mobile operating systems currently are : iPad (38.1%), iPhone (30.8%), Android (18.1%), Blackberry OS (4.5%) and iPod (4, 1%). SymbianOs and Windows Mobile are now on the sixth and seventh place.

The 20 sites together attract more than 5 million visitors a month and are distributed over various sectors such as news, entertainment, travel, training and e-commerce. This study specifically looked at the visits to the normal websites, the figures are based on the Goolge Analytics accounts of these websites . Obviously these figures will differ from visits to special mobile sites and mobile apps.

Although the number of benchmark sites is set to increase, the published findings are currently not representative of the Netherlands as a whole. Our conclusions should therefore be viewed as observations and trends. This study was conducted by Mobilemetrics.nl, a collaboration between aFrogleap, Netprofiler and RapidSugar.

Mobile is breaking record after record. Not surprising but nevertheless very noteworthy. Today it’s email read on mobile phones. As our current email metrics indicate, 4,5% email is read a mobile device. Mobilemetrics expect this will continue to grow in 2011 as the trend indicates.

You can easily double this figure. Why? Because Android doesn’t show up as much as it’s being sold. About 80% of the measured views are from iPhone. Our tracker, which enables us to come up with these statistics, is based on a good old image in the emails. Android and other devices are underrepresented in these statistics because the iPhone automatically displays images and Android doesn’t.

The iPad is on an unstoppable conquest! As reported in earlier November the iPad has dramatically put it’s foot down on mobile internet traffic (iPad traffic boom). This also goes for mail. Of all the outbound email measured, the iPad is responsible of 1% of the views in December and is continuing to grow.

The data used for this claim is based on our benchmark of 350 commercial bulk and transactional mailings for 6 companies in the Netherlands and represents in total about 1 million email views a month.

Recent events:
Android just released Gingerbread and Honeycomb, and is ready to take on the tablet battle with the iOS on the iPad. It is speculated that the CES on January 2011 was for 90% focussed on Android. Competition is good news, but marketing managers have even more devices to account for in communication with the consumer. Now more than even it is important to have solid facts about customer behavior and trends when it comes to mobile usage of your target group, so you can be part of the Mobile Marketing Succes Stories.

MobileMetrics will continue to distribute valuable information to its partners to help them make business decisions based on the right information.

A new benchmark study of ten Dutch e-commerce websites shows that nearly 0.9% of all internet traffic takes place through mobile devices. This is slightly higher than the 0.7% calculated in a recent benchmark survey conducted of 20 websites. Compared with normal visits (visits by computers and laptops for example), visits from mobile devices are significantly shorter, have fewer page views and transactions are done only occasionally. The mobile activity at e-commerce websites is very limited. The following differences surfaced when comparing “normal visits” with requests made through a mobile phone:

• Visit time of mobile visits is 40% lower
• Number of page views of mobile visits is 47% lower
• Conversion of mobile visits is 83% lower

To complete a transaction on a e-commerce website, it’s usually required to enter a significant amount of personal and financial information. It is therefore understandable that the conversion rate from mobile devices is significantly lower. Entering data using a mobile device is simply not as easy as when using a laptop or pc.

The benchmark study shows that the iPhone (58%) and iPod (12%) are the most used mobile devices to visit e-commerce websites. Other operating systems that are frequently used include Windows, SymbianOS, Blackberry and Android.

In the benchmark study Netprofiler has analyzed the Google Analytics statistics from 10 Dutch e-commerce websites. Only visits with devices where the screen width was less than 700 pixels are included in the research. These are almost certainly mobile devices. The visits per operating system are based on the first two months of 2010.

A benchmark research of 20 Dutch websites concludes that 0.7% of all internet traffic takes place via mobile devices. The devices include mobile phones, mobile music and media portable games. The Apple iPhone is currently by far the most common device to visit websites. More than half of the mobile internet hits (53%) in the benchmark study is done with an Apple iPhone. Other operating systems that frequently occur include: Windows, SymbianOS, iPod, Blackberry and Android. This top 6 is the same on almost all sites in the research. The share of mobile users in the total internet visits varies heavily per website. In the benchmark it is between 0.3% and 1.2%.

After the introduction of the iPad it has become clear. The iPhone and smartphone hype is over. Why I am stating something so obvious? While we are awaiting the much hyped tablet, the iPhone is ready for it’s fourth meaningful operating system update. Competing operating systems like Android are growing rapidly with hardware partners like HTC and Samsung. The entire smartphone industry is evolving from a niche market to a 180 million units per year business (Gartner).