We were prompted to further investigate the role of mobiles in our study of Xmas online traffic.
Mobile skews the numbers, it appears.
Looking at the average conversion ratio for a collection of websites during the period 1st-15th December, we can see a healthy 4.81% conversion rate across 16 selected websites.
However: a lot of the traffic comes from mobile devices - per Google Analytics. That's 13.3% from iPads and 6.9% from iPhones (excluding the all the other small-screen devices categorised as "mobile" by Google.
How are conversions on each of these devices? Here's a graphic showing the four conversion rates per website, with data for:
In average terms, the conversion ratio from desktops was 5.41% - 0.6% higher than the overall average. That's about 10% (imagine that % as an increase in your sales).
iPads (despite popular reports) convert less well than desktops at 4.16% (and this is true in all but two of the websites sampled), and 43% had websites where iPads performed better than the website average .
iPhones obviously bring up the rear with 1.3% - only a quarter as effective as desktops.
Moral: it pays to break out the devices as the range of behaviours is broad and the overall averages may not yield the "correct" answers.
