Seeing that it’s the end of the year I thought I would review my web site metrics and share some trends I’ve noticed regarding mobile usage. Note tomorrow I’ll review some interesting social media trends.
Ever since the iPhone was introduced in 2007 I’ve been keeping an eye on how my web site has been viewed. As mobile operating systems have evolved introducing real web browsers (real in the sense that they closely resemble computer based browsers) I’ve been anticipating that there would be a shift in browsing platforms from computers to mobile devices. There really wasn’t a question of whether it would happen, but when and how fast.
Mobile Site Traffic Trends at JMG-Galleries
This year appears to be noteworthy in that over a 1/4 of my site traffic now comes from visitors on mobile devices (cell phones, tablet computers, etc.). Above is a graph showing the percentage of my web site traffic coming from mobile devices. In short, nearly every year since 2007 traffic from mobile devices has doubled. If this trend holds true then next year could be the first year my site traffic is split between mobile devices and computers. Earlier in the year I realized I needed to adjust my site design to better accommodate mobile devices and implemented a responsive web template. Doing so could have helped sway the numbers, but I think whether my new web template went into effect or not I’d have seen this type of jump. Will 2014 be the year that mobile viewing takes over? We’ll see.
How did your web site fare with mobile traffic?
My mobile traffic is at 20% for 2013. Looks like I should accept the iPhone 4 a friend recently offered me – setting up a mobile compatible website without a mobile device would probably be challenging! It would seem that mobile is going to take up a rather large percentage of web traffic now and in the future.
Jim, thank you for the interesting perspective, it’s nice to see other’s data out there for comparison purposes. For me, I launched a newly designed website in January of 2013 and watched the traffic types very closely. One thing I noticed was that my desktop and tablet pages per view was very high, but my mobile (non-tablet) was low. Additionally, my bounce rates for tablet were almost unbelievably low in comparison to the other 2 types. In October of this year I worked on making my website more responsive for mobile devices and I’ve seen a slight boost so far, but it’s only been 1 quarter. If the non-tablet mobile demographic grows, I hope to see some growth here. However, the tablet demo seems to be growing the fastest from my statistics.