Just because you can see your desktop site on a mobile phone doesn’t mean it’s mobile-friendly. Mobile sites are designed for the small screen, with the needs of mobile users in mind. A mobile-friendly site can help your business connect with customers and drive conversions.
Your customers are already mobile. Are you?
Sources: Gartner, 2010; Google Mobile Optimization Webinar, 2011; Cisco, 2011
Users expect their mobile experience to be as good as their desktop experience.
Sources: Compuware, “What Users Want from Mobile,” 2011
A bad mobile experience can cost you customers.
Sources: Compuware, “What Users Want from Mobile,” 2011
Mobile users want to connect with the businesses in their local area.
Sources: Google “The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Users,” 2011
Apps are fun and useful, but many prefer mobile sites for shopping.
Sources: Adobe Systems “Adobe Mobile Experience Survey,” 2011; eMarketer, 2011
Businesses like yours can drive purchases with a mobile-friendly site.
Sources: Lightspeed Research; Google “The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Users,” 2011
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Established in 1974, today Kiddicare is the largest online nursery and baby supplier in the UK. The company cites commitment to customers as the key to success, so when Kiddicare.com noticed rising visitor numbers via mobile they knew they needed to take action. “We were seeing an increase in traffic coming from mobile devices and we knew that consumers were getting a poor mobile experience,” explains Simon Harrow, Kiddicare Technology Officer. With approximately 7% of traffic coming from mobile, it was important to optimise the experience for visitors on mobile devices to maximise conversions.
Although arguably in its infancy, it is absolutely fundamental for consumers to be
able to interact with you and your brand through a mobile device.-Simon Harrow, Technology Officer, Kiddicare.com
Keen to give their customers what they clearly needed, Kiddicare.com wasted no time. “Our mobile website from concept to launch took seven weeks,” explains Simon. The mobile site was built entirely in-house and “used existing IBM WebSphere infrastructure”. What was their process? “We went through the desktop website user journey and took out the elements that were important to our customers such as price, stock numbers, reviews and video. We tried to move as much of the functionality as possible to mobile. We removed anything that would weigh the pages down unnecessarily.”
Kiddicare.com have seen a 36% increase in traffic on mobile since March 2011 and recorded their first order four minutes after launch. “Mobile is fundamental to the customer purchase journey now,” Simon observes. “Already 6% of Kiddicare.com’s business is conducted via mobile. We think by the end of next year, 20% of our business will be through mobile.”
BuySpares had noticed that a growing number of visitors were viewing their site through mobile devices, so the obvious next step was to create a dedicated mobile version. Their main goals are to increase traffic to the site, and once there, to ensure that the user can locate and order the part they need in as few clicks as possible.
We saw a sharp rise of mobile users accessing the full site and wanted to give them a much faster option through a mobile version.
-Richard Williams, Head of Marketing, BuySpares.co.uk
BuySpares is the UK’s largest home and garden spares retailer with more than 40 years’ experience in the industry. They developed their site to recognise whether the user was accessing via a mobile or desktop device. Initially this just applied to the homepage, but was extended to cover all pages of the site, meaning that as soon as the user hit the site they would be automatically redirected to the mobile site. The site was launched after considerable internal testing, and was promoted through Adwords to increase online awareness, tracking performance using Google Analytics.
Since launching the site, mobile traffic increased by 40% and revenue by 31%. The time on-site remained steady and consistent with the desktop users, however the bounce rate decreased by 7%, suggesting that the mobile site was more user-friendly.
The Auto Trader brand is nationally recognised as the UK’s largest new and used car marketplace. For Autotrader.co.uk, it was important that visitors enjoy a seamless experience regardless of the channel they used to access the site. “People want to have a seamless experience across all channels when they see your website. Focus on making the desktop-mobile experience seamless,” is a key takeaway for Nick Gee, Mobile Director, Autotrader.co.uk
In the old days, people bought an Auto Trader magazine and brought it with them to buy the car. We lost that a bit with desktop but now we’re back in people’s pockets. Mobile is growing and it’s not going to slow down.
-Nick Gee, Mobile Director, Autotrader.co.uk
“At the time it was about focusing on what the user wants to do while on their mobile,” says Nick. They realised that key to this was the ability to refine searches, so they built their mobile website around that feature. “It was all about search and making the user experience quick to download and easy for the user to find what they are looking for when they are on their mobile,” continues Nick. They built more than 1,800 unique mobile websites for car dealerships in the UK.
Autotrader.co.uk currently receives 2.2 million unique visitors per month across all mobile channels, and has experienced a 138% traffic growth from mobile between September 2010 and September 2011. Mobile now accounts for more than 32% of all Auto Trader digital traffic and generates 25 million searches a month.
Mobile has become a key strategy for Auto Trader as they seek to tap into the ‘Always On’ mode of consumers having their mobile with them at all times. “We are developing industry-leading user experiences and focusing on understanding our user’s needs while we develop new products for our customers to reach the mobile audience,” states Amy Gale, Mobile Marketing Manager for Auto Trader. “We get mobile users all day and even into the evening,” continues Amy. “While both desktop and mobile use peak in the evening on weekends, mobile is strong all day while desktop activity is low. We estimate that 80% of our mobile users are using Auto Trader more because of their mobile access. It’s always to hand.”
The Carphone Warehouse launched in 1989 as a UK mobile phone retailer, and today has a portfolio of 2,453 stores across nine European countries. Enabling telephone communications on the go has been at the company’s core since the start. With strong retail propositions already in place through its network of stores and e-commerce site, The Carphone Warehouse is ideally situated to take advantage of the new marketing opportunities now available through mobile phones featuring full internet browsing capabilities.
Consumers want to be able to seamlessly jump from online to retail and back to online – and mobile is increasingly becoming the conduit to facilitating that gracefully. Mobile is critical to our success going forward.
-Gareth Jones, Head of Online Marketing, The Carphone Warehouse
Their first step was to build a site optimised for mobile that replicated almost everything on the desktop site, enabling visitors to browse and research handsets and price plans. They used Google Mobile Ads to drive smartphone traffic to the site, incorporating click-to-call in ads and on the site to enable multi-channel access to The Carphone Warehouse knowledge and utilised Mobile Ad Sitelinks to offer instant access to The Carphone Warehouse store finder.
Since launch, approximately 10% of all unique visitors to The Carphone Warehouse have been from the mobile optimised site. The click-through rate for Mobile Ad Sitelinks was 312% greater than mobile search activity where Sitelinks did not appear. Mobile activity as a whole delivered a cost per click that was 36% lower than desktop search.
Preloved is an online marketplace that allows people to buy and sell second-hand goods. It features hundreds of thousands of adverts and receives over 7 million visits every month. “We noticed a sharp increase in the number of people that were accessing our service using mobile devices,” says Managing Director, Ian Buzer, “and were keen to ensure that these users had the best experience possible”.
Just a few months after launch, nearly 25% of all the buying and selling activity on Preloved takes place on our mobile site.
-Ian Buzer, Managing Director, Preloved
The Preloved team identified two key tasks that people do on mobile: searching for sale items and sending messages between buyer to seller. The new, mobile-friendly site focuses on these actions, and brings local search functionality to the forefront. A fluid design adapts to available screen size, ensuring a great experience on any device
Preloved’s mobile users have quadrupled in the past year. What’s more, the mobile site has a better track record of matching buyers and sellers. There’s been a 41% increase in conversion over the same time period, and, with mobile usage continuing to grow, this is just the beginning for Preloved.
Careerjet is a leading job search engine with a large worldwide presence, aggregating over 40 million job ads from more than 70,000 websites across the globe. Knowing that 65% of commuters pass the time on their smartphones, Careerjet CTO and Co-Founder, Thomas Busch, wanted to let mobile users search for their next career move on the way to their current job.
[Mobile] is not a luxury but rather what users expect from a modern website.
-Thomas Busch, CTO, Co-Founder, Careerjet
Careerjet decided to create a stripped-down mobile version of their desktop site. A simple, mobile-friendly interface kept clutter to a minimum, and users were able to save search results on their phones, and then retrieve them later on the desktop site for a closer look.
The first Careerjet mobile site launched in 2009, and Busch and his team have been expanding and optimizing ever since. More than 15% of Careerjet’s job seeker traffic now comes from mobile devices—a 285% increase in mobile traffic in 2011. With mobile making a huge strategic impact, the company is allocating more and more resources to mobile development.
