While the global economy continues to see limited growth, there is one area that is continuing to see a massive expansion – mobile eCommerce, often referred to as mCommerce. It has been estimated that around 48% of consumers use their mobile devices to browse for products and mobile traffic is believed to surpass desktop traffic by 2015.
When a mobile user reaches your site, what is their experience? Is it smooth or complicated? To dig deeper, you have to immediately start optimizing your site for mobile.
Do you face difficulty measuring your mobile site? Is it not generating enough leads? How do you intend to provide great mCommerce capability? If you are equipped with endless questions, let me help you evaluate your mobile commerce site to ensure that your business also sees the right level of growth.
Understanding the following metrics is sure to make your site mobile-friendly.
Get Insight into the Mobile World
Before understanding the metrics, you should know exactly what to measure. To accomplish this, make the most of the analytics tracking software popularly known as Google Analytics. The software helps you to track campaigns, bounce rates, cart abandonment and even those products that bring in maximum revenue. You must first understand the way overall traffic pattern emerge from the performance of mobile.
The following three metrics will help you track user acquisition from different sources:
- Number of visits: How many people visit your website from a mobile device?
- Number of unique visits: How many different people have visited your website?
- Total page views: How many times are pages on your site viewed?
The most interesting thing you can track is how acquisition metrics change over time. You can see how the ratio of mobile to desktop traffic changes.
Learn User Behavior
The following three metrics will track users behavior to provide insights into whether a site is moving towards its goal.
- Page per visit: How many pages are viewed during a single visit on a mobile device?
- Time on site: How much time does each visitor spend on your mobile website?
- Bounce rate: How quickly do users turn away?
You can classify the mobile users into three categories of interaction:
- Browsing while bored: These people seek entertainment while waiting in line at the bank or in public.
- Browsing something urgent: These people seek sensitive information about a particular situation such as the next movie showtime or the nearest restaurants.
- Repetitive browsing: These people seek time sensitive information such as sports scores or stock quotes.
Understanding the mobile visitor’s ‘user mode’ sheds more light on the behavior metric over time. This is critical as mobile shoppers have several restrictions. Their experience is impacted by the device they use as well as the bandwidth of their Internet connection. So it is important to understand whether you are managing these aspects or ignoring them completely.
Get the Conversion Rate
The following two metrics track user conversions and the value of each of them. The results show how mobile visitors contribute to a site’s bottom line.
- Conversion rate: How many visitors proceed to the next step, such as registering or requesting more information or whether or not to purchase selected products.
- Average order size: This tracks what the average dollar amount per order is.
Concentrate on Optimizing the Design of Your Site
Richness and grandness will certainly not work with mobile websites. Mobile websites need to be precise to achieve better visibility. Remember that browsing a site on mobile devices can only be faster if the Internet connection is fast. Therefore, design the content and other elements of your site with an aim to make it mobile-friendly.
As each mobile device has it’s own characteristics, it is crucial to adapt to a responsive design template. All mobile devices differ in terms of the type of site content as well as volume. For instance, an iPad screen is more comfortable in displaying rich visual content when compared to the iPhone. Therefore, to offer easy browsing functionality, your site should be optimized so it can be viewed properly from an iPhone.
Responsive design can ensure that the entire site, including the home page, can be built, designed and used anywhere, anytime and on any device. Not only this, a site built using responsive design is also capable of detecting the nature of inbound traffic generated by your site in smartphones, iPhones, tablets or iPads.
Evolving mCommerce promises online business retailers promising outcomes in the coming years. So as you track metrics, you can get a comprehensive understanding of how a mobile website attracts customers and directs them to consider taking an action and then moving them to complete that action.
Tablet Shopping Photo via Shutterstock
Mobile traffic is unexplored but it has contributed to a lot of sales on the Internet. It is important to track this type of traffic so that you can know the conversion rate and the sales rate. I do it for our company and it can do wonders for market research.
William Johnson
Hi Aira! Exploring mobile traffic is crucial part of market research as it will help in finding new trends in consumer behavior which businesses can target differently.
efpierce
Where would I be able to find all of this information at a glance? Is there a service or a plug in for it because after reading your post, I am really interesting in knowing how well my mobile site is doing. I could as shoppers in a brief survey, but that might make them not want to return. Many people want to shop, not answer questions.
William Johnson
In order to monitor the performance of your mobile site, you can take the help of Google analytics which gives you detailed report regarding visitors preference.
Saqib Sherazi
Great article. I think what you mentioned can apply to all websites such as tracking user behavior and trying to increase conversion rates. Sometimes the problem may not be that your content is boring, it may be that people do not like the design of your website, or that someone clicked on an advertisement on your site and was lead away never to return. There can be a host of factors but the one thing that can and will help is interesting and engaging content that will motivate people to interact with you.
William Johnson
Thanks Saqib! Indeed a great content keeps the visitors interested about the site and can easily help in conversion.