Businesses are starting to feel the pressure when it comes to mobile marketing, but many remain on the fence about the new medium due to concerns about its ROI. This hesitancy may soon change, however, as studies continue to emerge which demonstrate that developing a mobile presence isn’t just about the ROI—rather, as some companies fail to engage their increasingly mobile market, the concern is shifting away from measuring the potential gains, to calculating what businesses stand to lose by not taking action.
A few weeks ago, we reported that mobile users are driving growth in the mobile industry—well, there’s more to that story: a new case studyshows that businesses that do not have a site optimized for display on mobile devices (or a separate .mobi or .m site) are losing valuable business opportunities on the small screen. Vegas.com, a specialized travel and entertainment site that offers a full range of booking and accommodation services as well as general tourist information, recently publicized the results of their mobile marketing experiment—and they unmistakably validate the case for mobile web optimization.
The company decided to invest in a mobile presence after realizing that a remarkable 7% of all traffic to their site came from mobile devices. This share seemed even more consequential when they realized that the bounce rate of visitors on mobile devices exceeded the rate of desktop visitors by over 50%. Once they recognized that they were turning away a rather significant portion of their target market, Vegas.com decided to take real, measurable action to prevent the loss of future business: they built several optimized mobile landing pages and A|B tested them with the standard web pages that seemed to repel mobile users (by alternating which page mobile users were sent to). The test produced results that weren’t just significant, but moreover surprising.
Even with just a few pages of content tailored to mobile users, and optimized for mobile access (not the whole site) the company saw a 22% drop in the bounce rate of mobile traffic to their site—a major improvement for their team. Additionally, the optimized pages stimulated user engagement with the mobile site, generating 16% more page views and (perhaps most critically) a 4% higher conversion rate. These impressive figures really speak to the concern of many businesses, large and small, that worry that the ROI of mobile marketing is immeasurable and untested. While the Vegas.com case offers just one study of how companies can take advantage of the small screen and stop missing valuable business opportunities, we expect to see many similar reports surface over the next few months and years, and we hope to help our clients achieve similar success in all their mobile ventures.
