The explosion in consumer use of mobile is somewhat over-documented but recently we’ve started to see mobile playing a greater part in B2B customer journeys. Two recent B2B digital builds (Elgood Flooring and TV Studio Floors) were both created using VNX 4, our digital services framework that works brilliantly on all devices and they’ve seen a huge spike in mobile traffic since the sites were launched in May.
We’ve seen the same, our site is pure B2B with zero consumers – yet the mobile traffic is now close to 20% of the total. This time last year it was at 12%. However, in marked contrast to consumer sites, we’re seeing that folks don’t stay long when using mobiles devices (less than 25% of the desktop visit duration). Tablet is better but the visit lengths are still half of the traditional desktop. Interestingly, first-time visitors have a slightly preponderance (13%) to visit from a mobile device.
Visits by device type for July 2013
I’m sure we can improve the content and focus more on mobile devices but the challenge here is to balance the needs of mobile and desktop users. Conventional wisdom suggest articles should to 400 words plus, but thats driven equally by Google’s indexing needs and the stickiness of a desktop visitor. Mobile visitor are not so happy trawling through 10 screen of reading. Maybe it’s time for Responsive Content, where the length and verbosity of the content is adapted according the device you arrive from.