Seasonal Mobile Growth

Christmas is upon us once more (well according to the major retailers anyway!) so it’s time for you to start thinking about what’s different this year. There will be an even greater shift this season towards mobile users, so are you prepared and have you thought about seasonal usage for your store?

What I learned

• Christmas is coming. And so are your customers! (Hopefully!)
• The Chrome tool to give you the edge
• Have you a seasonal business?
• Are you mobile ready?
• Bought from your own store lately?

Transcript

Hey, welcome back Rankers. It`s that time of year again, the 1st of October. You know what that means? Football season. Congratulations to all the Tiger supporters. If you don`t know what I`m talking about, that`s okay. But, it`s time for this, see? It`s that time of year and it`s already happening in the shops. I know, it’s not good. We`re all getting older and apparently retail decides that the 1st of October is the time to start playing Christmas carols in the shops. It`s also a good time for you as a retailer to start thinking about what`s different this year to last year? Well, one of the things is the amount of people now on mobile. Now, we keep saying this every year, but there`s some handy tools that you can look at. What I`m looking at today is the Chrome User Experience Report. Now this is a collection of information that Google collects about people using Chrome that are going to your site.

Okay? So here we have … and you`ll find different industries will trend differently with their devices depending on the time of the year. So you might find that yeah, Christmas is always busy right? Busier than normal. Okay, makes sense. But, in this particular case, for this client, the reason it`s busier than normal is because there`s a lot of people in this guy`s industry who will only participate or buy his products when they`ve got some time off. Because he`s in a sort of a spare parts area, right? And there`s a lot of hobbyists in that industry that he`s in. So it makes sense that he would spike during holiday times for mobile devices because it`s people who are not normally going to his site. They`re people who are just looking for a part or whatever it is, and they don`t have a computer with them. Whereas his regular users, which are more business focused, not hobbyists and those sorts of things, they would tend to have a desktop during the year.

So it`s really helpful to go and have a look and see how it`s changed. So in the case of this client, we can see that December last year we had 43% on desktop and then in June it went to 73% desktop and that is because of their industry. This one here is interesting, once again, spiking in summer and we know why that is. That`s related to the season, the actual summer, but there`s a whole variety of them. But, what we can see with most is that mobile is certainly becoming a greater share. Now, it might only just be when your seasonality spikes. But, chances are a larger portion of those users that are coming to your site in the busy times, a larger portion of them now are actually mobile users to what they were say when the site isn`t as busy during non-seasonal peaks, if you like. Right?

So the important thing is what are you doing with your mobile users this Christmas? How are you preparing for the silly season for your mobile users? When was the last time that you as a business owner purchased something from your own site via mobile phone? That`s standard for all our clients. That`s first thing, one of the first things we do. When`s the last time you do it as a business owner? Hopefully that`s helpful and we`ll see you next week. Thanks very much, bye.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.