Modern Insider – Online Marketing Blog

Two years ago mobile traffic for a typical site was measured in tenths of percents, today many sites see a few percent come in mobily and while that may not seem like much, when you’re measuring conversion rates towards goals that aren’t much higher it does matter and matter a lot.

While optimizing directly to mobile users may not be the most cost effective or low hanging project for today treating mobile like typical web surfers is a disaster waiting to happen. Consider for a second this basic and fairly conservative scenario.

Last year your site got 500,000 visitors with no notable mobile traffic. Of that 15,000 converted (3% CVR) by ordering online.This year you cut advertising due to the market so traffic fell to 450,000 and conversions to 13,000 (2.8% CVR). But wait; now you have 2% of your traffic from mobile devices. Ruled out your true conversion rate is actually still over 3% as mobile users can’t buy from your site.

As this simple example shows it doesn’t take a ton of visitors to come from mobile to upset your metrics and as apple, palm and blackberry blitz the world with cheap phones small gains will continue to mean small increases.

At the same time while mobile visitors may not convert into your typical sales funnel they may have value in other ways that can be considered much more valuable than if it was from a web based browser.

The first step in combating bad mobile conversion metrics is to understand how to measure them. Whether you use Google Analytics for free or something enterprise like Omniture or Webtrends measuring custom segments is a fairly straight forward process. Start by creating a custom segment bringing several “or” statements to identify different mobile platforms.

The only trick is that many mobile devices don’t identify themselves that way but by looking at screen resolution you can get around this. My suggestion is to use a combination of metrics including operating system (PalmOS, iPhone, iPod), browser (Blackberry) and screen resolution (320×396, 240×160, 480×320 and 320×240) to try and match as many mobile devices as possible. You can use some soft matches (rather than exact) to minimize the number of OR statements you have to go through. Save this as your mobile segment.

Once you have the ability to segment your reports it’s time to build a few use cases. While a typical web visitor may come to do lengthy research, download a white paper or to go through your conversion funnel, a mobile user likely has a much more focused task. Depending on what your site offers mobile conversion points will differ but generally center around some basic objectives like finding a store or phone number, getting basic product details or pricing. Unlike with typical visitors who you probably want to see convert online, mobile visitors likely convert just by browsing certain pages.

Use cases are extremely important in understanding your mobile visitor behavior. To start think about all the goals someone using a mobile device may have when they come to your site, map them out and then identify the ones that have a value to the business. Those are your new conversion goals.

If you’ve got the analytic sophistication you may be able to segment your goals or conversion points by device, if not you’ll have to map extra goals/ conversion rules and run your segment against them from time to time. Whether you want to loop both metrics together or segment them apart you can now identify your true conversion rate without hindrance from mobile while also seeing the impact mobile is having and start to identify the potential ROI associated with building a more mobile friendly site and make that business case.