I spend a lot of time with my nose in Google Analytics looking
at stats for corporate clients and I'm starting to notice a trend
emerging. Namely two key engagement statistics - time spent on site
and pages viewed per visit - have decreased over the past few
years.
Is mobile affecting engagement stats?
I have a theory I'd like to canvas opinion on to see if it's a
similar story in other sectors e.g. e-comms, publishing. Tracking
back, the decrease in time spent on site and pages viewed per visit
seems to correlate with an increase in mobile phone visits (which
started in earnest about 18 months ago).
The (very) rough pattern seems to be that mobile time on site
and pages viewed per visit rates are half that of the site average
e.g. average time on site is 4.42 minutes, while for mobile it's
2.11 minutes.
What's the rationale?
It's a fairly obvious connection to make, browsing the internet
on a mobile phone is often done on the move; when time is short and
the user's information need is very specific. Thus time spent on
site is shorter than when someone is sitting in front of a desktop,
in relative comfort, viewing a website in all its
glory.
The small screens on smartphones; the fact that most websites
are not built with mobile in mind and longer load times - all mean
that pages viewed per visit are fewer too, with users giving up
much more quickly if they can't find what they want or searching
straightaway to get what they need.
What are the implications?
So this poses a problem - how do you explain to clients or
colleagues (if you are in-house) why people are spending less time
on your site and viewing less content? It may not even be a bad
thing if users are finding what they need and leaving quickly when
browsing on a phone.
But to an outside observer less time on site is not good -
especially if increased dwell time has always been a key
performance indicator. Without concrete proof that mobile is
affecting these engagement statistics it just looks like content is
less interesting. It's clear the rise of mobile will continue over
the next few years and it's certainly a trend I'm keeping my eye
on.
What to do going forward?
Design for mobile - we can
recognise the trend toward bitesize mobile browsing and build sites
that are either optimised for mobile or that strip sites back to
the core information. By creating mobile summary sites, with the
option to go to the corporate site for full details, we give people
what they need quickly with minimum fiddling and searching.
Rethink KPIs - in a changing
digital world we are going to need to reassess what make a good KPI
for measuring the success. Should we move more towards custom goal
tracking rather than relying on the standard reports?
Balance quantative with
qualitative - most importantly we need to
understand the 'why' side of the coin. We have the 'what' in the
form of stats but lets get out there and observe how people browse
with their phones, so we're better equipped to interpret the hard
data by keeping real users in mind.