The latest report from Adobe claims that more website visits now come from a tablet than that of a mobile or smart phone. The report comes from February 2013, a sample size of 1 billion visits that sent traffic to over 1000 websites was used. PC visits still rule the roost, 84% of visits came from the PC / Laptop, 8% came from Tablet and 7 % came from the Phone.
We all saw the massive turnaround of device usage across the busy Christmas period, tablet searches in the luxury travel and the B2B space began to skyrocket. Travel bookings have increased by approximately 100% on Tablets in the past year.
Alongside the predictable growth of device usage is the amount of trust that we now put in the devices we use. In parallel with the reduction of % of visits to luxury travel websites through smart phones in comparison to the growth of tablet usage; Mobile basket values in the luxury travel sector dropped by 6.4% YOY from 2012 to 2013 whilst Tablet basket values increased by 9.9% in the same period. The largest rate of growth of basket size in luxury travel sector was on PC ‘s, recording a growth of 17.1%.
So what is happening? Are holidays getting more expensive? No
Do we have more devices to use and have more choices on which device we wish to make our final basket conversions? Yes, we now all have an average of 3 devices that we work with on a daily basis.
Are luxury travel vendors providing the best device specific experience for their clients? Clearly not; the latest research from Gartner confirms this; they cited a drop of 11.7% of PC sales in Western Europe over the last quarter of 2012, yet there is still a faster rate of growth of basket values using the PC for luxury travel products.
The opportunity for the future is to think of mobile as a unique experience; exclusive to a mobile audience and their needs. As advertisers, we now need to bid for PC and Tablet under the same brush (due to Enhanced Bidding). This doesn’t stop the user experience for tablets being more like an interactive brochure but with a similar navigational function to the PC experience. The PC and Tablet experience should be similar but not exclusively the same, the absolute basics of having specific call to action telephone numbers for each platform may be the simplest step into understanding who converts on what and when.
We will spend $2.7billion in Western Europe on mobile ads in 2013. Enhanced Bidding will produce threats and opportunities for everyone. There is a chance that if we can understand our audiences, knowing what, when and how they engage with digital content and advertising, we can increase our options of converting these visits into sales.
The next six months will be a period of time that will define those that did nothing and those that moved with the times. What camp do you want to be in?
