How Much Mobile Traffic Does Your Site Get?

If you’re like most business owners we talk to, you probably have Google Analytics installed on your website but don’t spend a lot of time looking through your data. And once you have the data, it’s even harder for an untrained eye to know what the actual insights and takeaways are from each report.

Today I wanted to walk you through some mobile reports in Google Analytics. There are a few important mobile metrics you should be tracking and reporting on a regular basis for a number of reasons:

1. First, more and more people are searching for your products and services on their phones.
2. Second, Google recently updated its mobile search algorithm to give ranking preference to mobile-friendly sites.
3. Both of these reasons lead to the most important reason of all—good mobile experience is going to be crucial for growing your business via the web!

Mobile Traffic in Analytics

In the Audience tab in Analytics, select “Mobile” and “Overview.”

Select the time frame you want to look at, check off the boxes for each device, then select “Plot Rows” in the upper left hand corner of the data table:

You’ll be able to quickly see how traffic by device has trended over the time frame you selected, as well as what percentage of your traffic comes from each device:

Why it matters:

Remember how I said Google changed its mobile search algorithm to give preference to mobile-friendly sites? If a large percentage of your traffic comes from mobile search, that’s the percentage of traffic you risk losing to your competitors if you don’t have a mobile-friendly site. You can test your site here.

Mobile Conversions in Analytics

Once you’ve found the Device report in Analytics, you’ve got a couple of options for gathering additional important mobile insights from here. To make things easy on yourself for future reporting, I recommend using the mobile and tablet advanced segment. Some people prefer to use the just mobile segment, but know that larger smartphones also can fall into the tablet category.

With this segment selected, you can pretty much look at any of the data you would usually look at, but this time from a mobile perspective.

For example, you’re probably wondering how well your mobile website traffic converts. Head down to the “Conversions” tab and select the “Overview” under “Goals”:

Of course, I’m assuming you have goal completions set up properly to look at this report, but I have to tell you that most businesses who come to us don’t have them set up at all. Whoops.

The biggest question you’re looking to answer here is “Is my mobile traffic converting?” If it’s not, you’ve got some work to do.

But keep in mind, for a lot of companies, people are only going to your website to get your phone number. If this is the case, make sure you have proper call tracking set up to better measure and evaluate your marketing strategies.

Keywords Used by Mobile Searchers in Analytics

So obviously your organic keywords are going to be limited, but if you have a paid search campaign running, it can be helpful to look at what keywords your mobile searchers are using to help you understand what they’re looking for:

To view this, click the “Acquisition” tab on the left hand side, and select “Paid Keywords” under “Campaigns.”

Other Important Mobile Metrics

Mobile Site Speed

Found under the “Behavior” tab, the site speed report will let tell you the average page load time in seconds:

Bounce Rate

Does your site load quickly enough to prevent mobile users from bouncing? There’s a term in the SEO world called “pogo-sticking”, where someone performs a search, clicks a result, then immediately hits the back button to try a different listing.

All pages have different pogo-sticking rates, and search engines take this into consideration when they rank those pages in search engine results.

Of course you can’t go crazy looking at bounce rate. We’ve written before about why site wide bounce rate is a useless metric.

But here’s where I would pay attention to it: if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website and you have a high bounce rate from mobile visitors, it might be time to consider investing in one.

How Accurate Is Your Data?

I’ve already mentioned this once or twice so far in this blog post, but when most companies first come to Blue Corona, they have Google Analytics installed on their site but aren’t using it correctly. Check out my post on the top 3 worst Google Analytics mistakes most companies are guilty of.

Blue Corona provides tools, services and solutions that help results-driven business owners and marketing executives more accurately measure, track and quantify each and every single advertising strategy.

Get started with a free analytics analysis below.

And if you need a mobile-friendly website, we can help there, too. Check out our design portfolio.