I found the actual traffic from mobile to be 29.1% when I checked 20 of our client websites for Q1 of 2014. This is up from 22.4% for Q1 of 2013. These mobile numbers include mobile phones and tablet visits.
I wanted to answer the question how much of the traffic going to small business websites is from mobile devices. I have heard some claims that it already exceeds desktop traffic. As I have analyzed client sites I have been seeing much lower numbers in their Google Analytics.
I went in and analyzed the Google Analytics for 20 small business websites. I looked at Q1 2014 and compared this to Q1 2013. There were 14 B2C websites and 6 B2B websites. The total visits (sessions) were about 270,000 for a Quarter so it should give some meaningful results.
Here are some specifics from my findings:
- Traffic from mobile phones rose from 9.3% in Q1 2013 to 12.3% in Q1 2014. Traffic from tablets such as iPad or Kindle rose from 13.0% to 16.8%.
- Consumer websites (B2C) had the highest volume of mobile use. Traffic from mobile phones rose from 9.9% in Q1 2013 to 13.1% in Q1 2014. Tablet visits rose from 13.8% in Q1 2013 to 17.8% in Q1 2014.
- Traffic to sites that marketed to businesses (B2B) had a much lower amount of traffic coming from mobile. Mobile phones accounted for 4.2% of the traffic in Q1 2013 and this rose to 4.7% in Q1 2014.
The website that had the highest percent of mobile phone traffic was a local landscape nursery that sells to consumers. They had 19.4 % of its website traffic coming from mobile phones and 22.2% from tablets in Q1 2014.
The website that had the lowest amount of mobile traffic was a quality system auditor for businesses. Their traffic from mobile phones was only 3.4% and tablet traffic was 5.0% in Q1 2014.
Summary
In this study traffic from mobile devices grew 30% over the last year. Access from tablets is higher than from mobile phones. B2C websites have a much higher volume of visitors from mobile than B2B websites.
The rate of growth from mobile is still very high so we will continue to see website traffic convert from desktop to mobile devices. Websites need to change to accept this mobile web traffic.