Do any of you guys have any first hand conversion data you'd be willing to post? I'm most interested in retail, but any type of device conversion comparison data would be interesting.
I can share privately. Its UK, quite old customer base, are there particular analytics pages you would like?
I can give you a snap shot of x combined sites over x period.. eCom.
I can't say much but Rumbas's shot roughly matches my experience. In a nutshell, the bigger the screen the better the conversion rate.
The large-screen visit that converts is often a return visit. People discover the site on a smaller device then come back later on a bigger screen to look around in more detail.
It's something to keep in mind for planning PPC bids.
Thank you everyone. This all has been very helpful.
Unfortunately, I lost access to the larger sites I used to work on.
For a smaller site, since March 1, there have been 280 purchases. Conversion rates as follows:
"Desktop" (which is not actually desktop anymore): 1.60%
Tablet: 1.27%
Mobile: 0.66%
At the hotel, where we usually had over a million dollars a month to parse out, there were numerous signs that people increasingly had a "research on mobile, convert on desktop" pattern. For example, we would see a surge in mobile traffic, but not a proportional surge in mobile conversions. But then we would see a surge in desktop transactions without a proportional surge in desktop traffic. We also had the problem that a lot of mobile conversions were off-site (i.e. through OTAs, which generally have a better purchasing experience than a hotel's native site since most people have their details already loaded in their account).
So my conclusion was that the mobile experience is more important than the numbers would suggest. YMMV
QuoteIn a nutshell, the bigger the screen the better the conversion rate.
Yup. I get double the conversion to desktop to mobile
Shared some more granular data over a longer period on a spreadsheet on a PM LM.
Dream of Rumbas conversion rate :)
What you say there makes sense Ergo, but I have never been able to pin that down though on my small numbers.
I wouldn't say I really "pinned it down." It was more of a set of hunches. As I said, the main one being my best guess for why, on a site that was basically unchanged, mobile traffic was increasing consistently and desktop traffic was holding steady or decreasing, but desktop conversions were increasing and mobile conversions really weren't. So desktop conversion looked better and better. My best guess was that people were doing most of their research while sitting on the couch or waiting in line at the grocery store, then moving over to the desktop to purchase.
But in lodging there is so much leakage to OTAs, especially to people on mobile, it's just impossible to really "pin down."
I'm not sure I was right, but vague signs like that made me feel that we needed to treat the mobile conversion rate with a grain of salt.
Actually for Amazon, I use the Amazon for Business app a lot to make purchases. When I'm cleaning or maintaining the rental and see that something is out or broken, I like to order it right then and there before I move on. The thing is, the app is much less usable than a browser for comparison shopping, because you can't open candidate products in separate tabs. It's a very "linear" design. So I often research on a mobile browser and convert on the app.
It's possible that at the hotel I was projecting my personal behavior onto the numbers, but I can't think of another reasonable explanation. And the numbers are reasonably large. In at least half the months it was over a million in sales with generally predictable seasonal patterns.
Thanks again all for the help. I think Amazon is probably in a special category when it comes to desktop vs mobile. Most Amazon shoppers are logged in on their phones and the cross device integration works well. That said, they don't make it easy to tap into that data as a seller.
Seeing the same patterns as you folks are for ecommerce sites. Across the board desktop conversions roughly double that of mobile with tablet dragging along at the bottom of the pile.
But from lead gen based sites the general rule is that mobile converts at treble that of desktop.