NEWS

iPad generates half of the mobile website traffic

Friday, December 9th, 2011   

A benchmark study of 20 Dutch websites reveals that the Apple iPad generates almost half (48%) of the mobile visits to these websites. The study shows that in November 2011 7.5% of total website visits was generated by mobile devices like smartphones, tablets and mobile music players. A year ago, in November 2010, the observed average for the same sites was 2.2%, so the mobile visits more than tripled in a year. If the growth continues at this rate, it is expected that in Q2 of 2012 this will be more than 10%.

Mobile web traffic has tripled in one year

Growth of mobile web traffic

The biggest growth is detected in the use of the Apple iPad. On average, the iPad has a 48% share in mobile visits, in November 2010 this was 28%. For phones using the Android operating system, the share in mobile visits grew from 12.5% in November 2010 to 21.0% in November 2011. The top mobile systems currently are : iPad (48%), iPhone (25%), Android (21%), Blackberry OS (1.6%).

The 20 sites together attract more than 5 million visitors a month and are distributed over various sectors such as news, entertainment, travel, education and e-commerce. This study specifically looked at the visits to the normal desktop websites, the figures are based on the Google Analytics accounts of these websites . Obviously these figures will differ from visits to special mobile sites and mobile apps. The percentage of mobile visits per website differs from 3% to 13%.
As the number of benchmark sites is limited, the published findings are not totally representative of the Netherlands as a whole. Our conclusions should therefore be viewed as observations and trends.

Mobile website visits doubled in the past six months in the Netherlands

Friday, June 24th, 2011   

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.

Case study: Marktplaats iPhone application records 900 thousand visits a month

Monday, April 18th, 2011   

The iPhone application of Marktplaats had almost 900 thousand visits last month, there are currently about 180 thousand users who are regularly using this application and all users generate over 17 million page views a month; this makes the Marktplaats application one of the most popular of lifestyle apps in the Netherlands. These figures are revealed by MobileMetrics in cooperation with Marktplaats.

Mobile is a very popular medium among Markplaats users. Currently about 2% of the traffic is originating from a mobile device. Marktplaats also noted that the mobile traffic is growing this year with about 30 – 50% a month. It is observed that from 08:00 hours people start using the iPhone app, while the traffic peaks between 20:00 and 22:00. Apparently the use of a mobile is also very popular on the couch.

Geographical use:

The use of the Markplaats iPhone app in the 25 biggest cities in the Netherlands (More than 100 thousands residents) is studied, it is concluded that Leiden is relatively the biggest orgin of visits in this app. In the period between February until March Leiden counted relatively 0.28 visits per resident. Followed by Amsterdam and Utrecht with 0.22 visits per resident. Rotterdam and The Hague both scored 0.17 visits per resident. Emmen is found the least busy city, registering only 0.03 visits per resident. In the study both residents and people using the Markplaats app while visiting the city were counted.

Devices:

41.1% of the users is using an iPhone 4, 28.4% the iPhone 3GS and only 10% is using the older iPhone 3G. The application is also being used on iPod’s and iPad’s.

iPad most used mobile device for web surfing

Monday, April 11th, 2011   

A benchmark research of 20 Dutch websites indicates that the iPad currently is the most widely used mobile device to visit websites. The sample shows that 3.6% of total internet visits in the month of March 2011 is originating from mobile devices. The devices included mobile phones, tablets and mobile music players.

The Apple iPad is the most used mobile device in the last 3 months followed by the iPhone. More than one third of all mobile internet visits in March 2011 was originating from the iPad. The top 5 mobile operating systems currently is: iPad (34.4%), iPhone (33.9%), Android (16.9%), Blackberry OS (5.9%) and iPod (4.7 %). SymbianOs and Windows Mobile are currently on the sixth and seventh place. Remarkably, the use of the iPad was even slightly higher in January 2011 than in February and March.

In a similar analysis of the same 20 sites in October 2010, the percentage of mobile usage was at 2.0%. That’s an increase of 80% of mobile visits within a half year. The mobile visits as part of the total visits varies between 1.6% and 5.9% for these 20 sites. The sites together generate around 5 million visitors a month and are divided into various sectors such as news, entertainment, travel, training and e-commerce. This study specifically looked at the visit to the normal websites. Of course these figures will differ from visits to special mobile sites and mobile apps. This observation indicates that mobile devices are increasingly used for surfing and that the majority of these mobile devices are Apple products.

Mobilemetrics.nl bases its findings on information received from the 20 site owners and brands currently sharing their data with us. Our data partners represent 5 million site visitors a month. Although this number 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.

Email views on mobile device doubled in a half a year.

Thursday, January 13th, 2011   

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.

In almost a year mobile internet usage tripled in The Netherlands.

Friday, November 26th, 2010   

A benchmark research of 20 Dutch websites shows that 2.0% of all internet traffic takes place through mobile devices. These devices can be divided in mobile phones, mobile music players and tablets. The research period was September and October 2010. The 2.0 % is a growth of 285% compared to a similar research that was done in the fourth quarter of 2009. The mobile visits Q4 of 2009 were 0.7 % of the total visits. This trend is expected to continue. Forrester announces that 47% of all the Dutch people will adapt mobile internet by 2014.

The iPhone is still by far the most common mobile device to visit websites in The Netherlands. More than a third of the mobile internet visits (38,9%) is done with a iPhone.  The Apple iPpad, which was introduced at the of July 2010 in the Netherlands, is responsible for 23% of all mobile internet traffic. This is a good second place. Other operating systems that frequently are used Android, Blackberry and SymbianOs. Windows Mobile and SymbianOS lose market share. The top 6 devices are:


The share of mobile users in the total internet visits varies heavily per website. For the 20 websites in this benchmark the mobile visit share is between 0.8% and 4.1%. In this research Apple’s total market share was 68,9%.

The iPad traffic boom

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010   

Since the iPad introduction in the Netherlands at the 23th of July the current sales figures are already comparable to that of the iPhone and the adoption is said to be better than that of the DVD. The iPad is the new addition to the living room and yet another device that will visit your business website or open your marketing email.

What kind of impact does this device have on your business? How to react properly to the adoption of this new device? And is the iPad already taking a significant portion of the website traffic? These questions are nowadays buzzing in the heads of digital marketers.

Mobile metrics was involved in the launch of a new mobile website for one of the biggest retailers in the Netherlands. This retailer has stores all over Holland and attracts the average Joe consumer. With the iPad just launched in the Netherlands the results of the iPad traffic were above all expectations. After approximately three weeks ‘air time’ the following statistics were retrieved:


As presented in the table above the iPad users are responsible for 12,5% of all visits to this mobile website and the iPad users view the most pages per visit (avg. 4.11). (Note that all Apple products share 55.8% of all visits). This means, also for iPad critics, there is definitely significant traffic originating from the iPad and cannot be ignored when building a new website.

Flash site on iPadWhat action do you have to take? The easy option is to display the normal website on the iPad, but if your website uses Flash elements and/or you care about user experience, this is not the way. The adobe flash website is for example totally useless on the iPad. (Screenshot 1)

The other option is to display the mobile version of the website on the iPad. These are always viewable on the iPad. But the iPad screen dimensions will generate white spaces and small text, which will not be optimal for user experience. The main Gmail page www.gmail.com is a ‘good’ bad example for this practice. (Screenshot 2)

Businesses in the US are already releasing their “iPad ready” Gmail on iPadwebsites like cnn.com, nytimes.com and vimeo.com perfectly designed for portrait and landscape views and optimal space usage, and they are right! Every business site should mature to a multi- platform/device website.

With this kind of mass adoption it can be concluded that

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What to build? An app or dotMobi?

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010   

Finally your regular site is user friendly, your conversion rate is increasing and there you have the mobile website trend. So you can start all over again. Mobile websites have been around for some time, but since the introduction of the iPhone mobile internet is getting past the early adapter stage. Creating a mobile website is not just translating the one you have into something similar but smaller. Compressing a complete website into the size of a mobile phone screen is like compressing your car into the size of a dinky toy and expecting you can actually drive it. Not going to happen. The screen of a mobile phone is getting bigger with the introduction of the touch screen, but even then it’s just a fraction of the size of your screen at home.

To make your content accessible on all mobile phones you first have to choose whether you create an application or a whole mobile website. This decision still depends a lot on the functionalities you would like to offer.

Choose a mobile website if your content consists of many short articles, some pictures and sometimes a small video. For a newspaper or blog this kind of mobile website works excellent. But you have to keep it basic. Make use of the standards and conventions out there. If you would like to show your mobile website on as many phones as possible it must be scalable for different screen sizes, use only hyperlinks for navigation and make proper use of CSS for mobile devices. Key is to label your categories in a good way. If nobody understands them, navigation will be difficult for your users. Getting advice from an information architect won’t be a waste of money if there is a lot of content to choose from. When you’re not sure about the understandability of your links it is also possible to do a card sorting session. This is a common research method for regular websites, but equally effective for mobile websites.

Advantage of an application above a website is that you can ask money for it. A lot of apps are a bit disappointing after installing so paying for it can be a hurdle. That’s why many applications are also available in a light version to trigger the potential consumer. They can get used to the app and then decide to pay for the extra functionality if it’s worth it.

So choosing web or app really depends on the type of content you have to offer. If it is for content browsing like a newspaper a mobile website suits best. You can reach a lot of different mobile phones and are more flexible. If you need more interaction for your application, want to use more functionality of the phone or would like to offer a better integrated user experience then create an app.

Mobile activity still very limited at e-commerce websites

Monday, March 22nd, 2010   

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.

0.7% of webvisits via mobile devices

Monday, February 1st, 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%.

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