The UNC-Chapel Hill Webmasters group had a nice discussion on 4/8/2011 about many-things-mobile.  Topics included mobile device-wipe, use of mobile devices to access web-based information and the development of mobile-optimized web sites.  Of interest to me was the discussion of traffic from mobile devices.  Below I talk briefly about mobile traffic on a few sites in the College of Arts and Sciences.  I then pursue a very short Socratic dialog with respect to mobile efforts.

The conventional wisdom clearly points to the ever-growing share of mobile devices to access web-based information.  At OASIS in the College of Arts and Sciences we have, for several years, offered a content management system for department web sites using Plone.  For the last few years we have used Google Analytics to collect usage data.  While many of our departments see fewer than 2k to 3k visits per month some see 50k to 60k and one particularly busy site (the Writing Center) has seen 602,897 visits in the last month.  30,490 of those visits (5%) were from mobile devices.

Two quick notes before we move on:  1) the Writing Center site is in Plone and 2) it is one of my favorite sites to point to in discussions with anyone that wants hot/cool/new feature sets in their web site.  I am often heard repeating the refrain: “content over features”.  The Writing Center site is chock full of well written, locally developed content.  That is what drives their traffic.  It also doesn’t hurt that the subject matter is important the world over.

 

Counts of Visits

Looking at two other sites from two time frames: 11/01/2009-3/10/2010 and 11/01/2010-3/10/2011 we see similar results in counts of visits:

advising.unc.edu

  • 2009-2010: 1,031/114,421
  • 2010-2011: 2,318/114,979
  • growth: 124% (377 of the current period visits were from iPads which are counted as mobile, though they have a perfectly serviceable non-mobile browser)

college.unc.edu

  • previous:  731/77,911
  • current: 2533/83,339
  • growth: 246% (the iPad counting for 787 of the difference)

 

No, don’t spend time on mobile

Hmmm, what can I distill from this decidedly small and unscientific sample?   Perhaps better put:  Given many and varied competing priorities, how much effort might I want to spend on custom development to support mobile users?  Given what I know today: something near 5% of my effort.  To that point there are freely available plugins like. WPtouch which is active on this site.  Others exist for Drupal and I suspect most other major open source CMS’s.  These are quick and painless (at least in WordPress) to configure.

My sense is that in a world of competing resources I would lean heavily toward spending time with content managers developing good content along with a strong information architecture.  Once I’ve got that in place I can enable freely available and easy to implement tools to improve the mobile user experience.  If after that there is some really compelling (like, really, really) then I’d spend time thinking about it.

Yes, you have to spend time on mobile

First, those are some pretty insane period to period growth figures!  I mean, come on, a 401k with those numbers would be awesome.

Second, one might, with additional conjecture, be able to conclude that those mobile users are new users who may not have otherwise visited your site at all.  In fact if you look at the period to period growth in traffic for college.unc.edu nearly 40% of the growth was from mobile devices.  Perhaps the same set of folks who are foregoing land lines are using their mobile devices instead of as opposed to an adjunct to, old school laptops and desktops.  If that is the case then I can see making more and more of an argument towards spending effort on making sites mobile friendly.  Amazingly, though, advising.unc.edu had almost precisely the same number of visits during the two periods so one might conclude that the increase in mobile visitors was really just poaching from the non-mobile.  In other words we weren’t getting more eyes on the content.

Bring on the Poll

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