How Important Is Mobile to Your Business? Check Your Mobile Usage Analytics

Lauren Owens - April 22, 2015

There’s no denying that mobile-friendliness is an important aspect of usability, and now rankability. But, for a variety of reasons, many businesses remain on the fence when it comes to investing in mobile. This could be because they don’t know how to go mobile, or they don’t have the budget to invest in creating a user-friendly mobile experience.

Whatever the reason, if you’re going to abstain from mobile, it’s a good idea to know exactly what you’re leaving on the table. Luckily, there’s an easy way to see whether mobile is important to your business right in Google Analytics.

Mobile usage data is available under the Audience section of Google Analytics. Simply navigate to Audience inside Google Analytics, click on Mobile and Overview.

From there, you will see user data that shows how many users view your content from which devices – desktop, mobile and tablet. For example:

Under Sessions, you will see both traffic volume and percentage numbers by device. In the example above, approximately 10% of the traffic came via mobile device. (This is for a B2B organization; these numbers would likely be higher for B2C.)

Another interesting metric to look at here is Bounce Rate. If your Bounce Rate is higher on mobile than desktop, you might have an even bigger issue, as users could be bouncing due to a lack of usability. Of course, you will also want to look at your conversion metrics. If your desktop conversion rate is 3% but your mobile conversion rate is .3%, you could have a big user experience problem.

To gain even further granularity, you can look at the Devices metric in order to see what specific devices your users are using to access your site. For example:

These metrics can give you an idea of the various types of screen sizes you’ll need to design for, or at least think about, when approaching mobile. Note: You would never want to design for a single mobile screen size.

Once you have this data, you can begin to see just how important mobile is to your organization. Even if mobile only represents 10% of your overall traffic, as it does in the example above, month after month, this adds up. If you’re on the fence about whether to devote budget to finally attacking mobile, consider how much this traffic means to you. Then, make an informed decision.