In the last few years, there’s no doubt that a growing amount of website traffic comes from mobile devices. As more and more people get access to the internet via their phones, mobile has become one of the leading priorities in online marketing.
As a result, Google is putting a lot of emphasis on mobile friendliness, and the mobile user experience. To the extent that they will soon be using the mobile version of a site in order to determine its search engine ranking, in a move that they’re calling mobile first indexing.
And certainly the stats are clear that mobile traffic is finally outstripping desktop traffic in general.
Not Always Mobile First
That said however, thanks to a recent study comparing mobile and desktop usage, it has been discovered that there are still some areas were desktop continues to outperform mobile use.
First, the study has confirmed that on average, 55% of all website visits now originate from mobile devices. However, pure traffic isn’t the whole story.
Time On Site
According to the study by Stone Temple, 40.1% of the total time spent on site is from mobile traffic, while desktop traffic accounts for 59.9% of teh total site time. So people on desktops are likely to spend more time on a site than mobile users will.
Bounce Rate
Mobile users are also much more likely to abandon the site immediately after arrival, with mobile bounce rates being 40% higher than desktop bounce rates. (To be fair, this might be partly due to lack of mobile friendliness, but only partly.)
Total Page Views
Like the bounce rate and the time on site, desktop users have a far higher percentage of total page views than mobile users do. 58.5% of all page views were on desktop.
Desktops Still Important
At the end of the day, while mobile traffic is higher, desktop traffic accounts for a significantly greater amount of engagement on sites. And it doesn’t mater how many visitors you get…what matters is how engaged they are with your site and offering.