These days, it doesn't matter how good your digital advertising campaigns are, if your ads lead to a poor mobile landing page experience beyond the click, you won’t get great results.
According to Similarweb, American Traffic Share by Platform as of August 2023 positions the mobile market as the largest offering 58.98% of opportune traffic, followed by desktop at 38.87%, and tablets with only 2.15%. However, high traffic doesn't necessarily translate into high conversion rates. In fact, conversion rates on mobile have been historically known to return far lower conversion rates when compared to desktop performance. So what can you do to maximize your return on ad spend and benefit the organic growth of your website?
Understand The Consumer Journey
Think about how many things you do on your mobile phone throughout the day — check the news, order food, plan a trip, doom scroll – Your mobile usage is vast and complicated - and that's okay! The consumer journey consists of many cyclical stages: first, a user responds to a prompt encouraging them to take action. Next, they enter an exploration mindset and begin to gather information and compare options.
Then, they enter what Google has nicknamed "the messy middle," where they flip-flop between exploring and evaluating a variety of different options. The internet holds a lot of information and is capable of presenting endless choices across endless things. When it comes to shopping specifically, it takes prospects an average of at least six visits to an app, a mobile website, or both before making a transition. This part of the process is known to hold the greatest risk due to the many interruptions and factors that might influence an immediate decision.
Finally, the final action in the consumer journey is what we call performing a "conversion" action. This can be a purchase, a download, a subscription, an account creation, a form submission, a donation, a completed video view - whatever. Identify the action that is most important and make that final action as easy as possible for the user to complete from whatever page they may land on.
Build Better Mobile Experiences
To maximize online advertising investments, website owners must prioritize the mobile user experiences. However, this task is tangled in multiple unique challenges such as fewer available pixels due to smaller screens, slower network speeds in certain regions that can lead to longer loading times, limited memory leading to lower performance than desktop (large amounts of data like downloads/files can fill the device's memory and slow down performance).
Despite the challenges, focusing on mobile-friendly designs can deliver significant benefits for businesses online. By tailoring content and functionality to fit smaller screens, companies can take advantage of direct, frequent, and extended exposure to their target audience therefore organically enhancing brand visibility and engagement around the clock.
Further, by addressing performance issues and reducing loading times, businesses provide their patrons with smoother interactions, which can positively impact user satisfaction and conversions. So why not take the opportunity to strategically position your mobile storefront and reap the benefits of a highly engaged user base?
How to "Quantify" & "Calculate" The Impact of Mobile Experience Improvements
In order to fully determine what impact an improved mobile experience might have on your business, you'll need to know the exact number of clicks, mobile conversion rate, and average order value within a specified timeline.
Let's say you've achieved 100K clicks to your mobile site within the past month and reached a mobile conversion rate of 1.5% resulting in 1.5K conversions. Say each sale averaged about ~$200 per order. 1,500 conversions multiplied by an average order value of $200 is equal to $300K in revenue. The equation becomes:
(number of clicks * mobile conversion rate) * average order value = revenue
Example:
– 100,000 x 1.5 = 1,500
– 1,500 x $200 = $300,000
Then, you take your last month's income and invest -$50,000 to improve your website's mobile user experience. In this scenario, your mobile conversion rate improves by +0.5% within one month (a total of 2%). You again achieve 100K clicks through your mobile site and maintain the prior month's average order value of $200. 100K clicks and an average mobile conversion rate of 2% results in 2K conversions. 2K conversions multiplied by an average order value of $200 is equal to $400K in revenue – A +$100K increase compared to the previous month.
Why Focus on the Post-Click User Experience?
Within the digital landscape, people around the world can engage with content and products across various touchpoints that may spark the beginning of a more intricate journey. Clicks alone don't guarantee a positive outcome for an online advertising campaign. If the user's journey after clicking on an ad is frustrating, unhelpful, or irrelevant, you'll miss out on a potential conversion, waste the marketing budget, and negatively impact customer satisfaction and the brand's reputation.
Consider using Google's "Test My Site" to evaluate and record your site health. By taking a data-driven approach, you can identify areas in need of improvement and make informed, evidence-based decisions. The actionable insights for enhancing your mobile site's speed, personalization, and seamlessness can be shared with developers or product teams to formulate an optimization plan, ultimately steering your marketing efforts toward a more fruitful future.
By prioritizing the post-click user experience, you not only enhance your chances of conversion but also safeguard your budget, maintain customer satisfaction, and preserve your brand's reputation.
