Does your Mobile Strategy have an end game?
Responsive Web Design fits the bill
Do you advertise on the web or know someone who does? When it comes to mobile ads, you may be wasting your money if a responsive website is not part of the equation. (If you don’t know what responsive design is at this point, I’ve got you covered, I conveniently teach an online course on the subject.) Let’s begin with a well known fact: More people are accessing the web on cell phones and tablets than ever before, AND the rate of increase from year to year is downright staggering, especially for phones. There is nearly one mobile-cell subscription for every human on the planet, an estimated 6.8 billion.
Impressive, no doubt, but is it still “news”? After all, it’s obvious if you look around that smartphones and tablets are everywhere. The real question is how does this change business behavior?
I’m more of a designer and and educator than a businessman, but I found a lot of value in recent data about how more money than ever is being targeted at mobile users. This fact illustrates something important about mobile strategy and responsive design as a whole. Let’s take a closer look.
Follow The Money
Every year in preparation for the Thanksgiving and Black Friday consumer spending frenzy in the United States, businesses have to decide how much money they will spend on targeting potential customers who are searching for stuff on the Web. Specifically they have to decide where they will allocate those dollars: Will they target computer users (laptops, desktops) or will they target phone or tablet users?
So let’s follow that cash: Over the two day span of November 25 & 26 in 2013, businesses spent twice as much money targeting ads for tablet users and almost twice as much on phone users than they did a year ago. Here are the specific data points if you’re interested:
In 2012 on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, businesses focused 79.5% of their budgets on computer users, 11.8% on phone users and 8.7% on tablet users.
This year, only 60.3% went to computer users, while 21.2% went to phone and 18.5% to tablet users.
- (Source: http://www.kenshoo.com/blog-post/thanksgiving-black-friday-2013)
Those are fairly significant numbers when you consider 5 years ago nearly 100% of that budget was for computers, heck, tablets weren’t even a category! Instead of focusing on the abstract stats, though, let’s look at one simple example.
Samantha’s life will change with a little help from Responsive Design
Samantha is 25, and her gums have just been shot up with a hefty dose of Novacaine. She’s about to get a cavity filled and has 15 minutes until the dentist returns. Samantha’s been thinking about getting a commercial license to drive a truck and with this found time on her hands, she launches the browser on her smartphone and types in “cdl training” into Google’s search engine (she’s done a little research already). A few sponsored ads appear and she taps the first result for “King’s Driving School”.
The site that appears is very different than what she would see if she were on a desktop computer. She sees a home page with vertical navigation, the two top items “Call us” and “Find us” might have been helpful if that’s what she was here to do, but she has no idea who this company is, what their reputation is or anything else. All she has to go on is what she sees here.
She taps on the link for Commercial Vehicles, but the resulting page is generic, uninspiring and does not compel her to explore further. She exits the site.
Strike one.
Samantha goes back to the search results and tries the next result. For some reason the page doesn’t load immediately, she waits for 9 or 10 seconds watching the loading animation, grows impatient and then leaves.
Strike two.
She goes back to the search results and is thinking about abandoning this whole web browsing thing and going for level 165 of Candy Crush, but gives it one more shot.
On the third site there are some clear and strong messages on the home page that speak to Samantha. She scrolls down the page and likes what she sees.
She explores a bit, but the next step is clear, she’s got about 10 minutes left before the dentist comes back and so she decides to apply for training right there and then.
The application is a 5 step process broken up logically into separate forms and it’s pretty thorough: asking for personal information, past work history and all sorts of things, it takes Samantha about 7 minutes to fill out and when she finishes the last step she sets up an appointment to have her application reviewed. I’ll take some literary license here and let you know that she went for the training the next week, eventually passed her exam and is loving her new job.
Home run.
What went wrong for sites #1 and #2?
Samantha’s new job began with the results of a Google search found while sitting in a dentist’s chair. Let’s break down why site #3 won her attention and not the first two. The owners of the first site were savvy enough to buy an advertisement targeted for mobile users (btw, yeah you can do that now using Google’s “enhanced campaigns”) and then send them to their mobile site, but their site was “mobile” in only the most technical sense, it didn’t do any of the other things that make a website compelling such as including clear and engaging content or a focused marketing message. There is no silver bullet that makes a website effective just because of its format or template (which is true of any website really), Brad Frost put it best in his 2012 article Missing the Point:
Your visitors don’t give a shit if your site is responsive. They don’t care if it’s a separate mobile site. They don’t care if it’s just a plain ol’ desktop site. They do give a shit if they can’t get done what they need to get done.
Let’s expand on Brad’s point and look at the second site’s problem. Actually, that site might have had really great content, design and marketing messages, maybe even better than site #3, but we’ll never know because the page never loaded. Perhaps the images were too large or maybe it was using a bloated content management system, maybe the owner cut corners with a cheap server, whatever the issue was, after 10 seconds Samantha was history.
The third site (the successful one) not only had a pleasing design and strong, yet simple content but the home page had a file size of 287k, (roughly 75% smaller than the average web page these days), this resulted in speedy load time and performance while Samantha was stuck in the dentist’s chair. More importantly, the entire user experience was carefully considered, everything from the home page to the design of the forms and this makes all the difference in the world. Oh and did I mention that the site was responsive? This means the content on the phone and the desktop are one and the same and so if Samantha waited until she got home on her PC everything would have looked very familiar and possibly be even more compelling by taking full advantage of the larger desktop screen.
A “mobile strategy” is simple: if you pay for an ad that targets mobile users, make sure the destination site is responsive.
Resources from this article:
- My free responsive web design course at Aquent Gymnasium.
- The 2013 ITU World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators report. Lots of great data on trends around the world.
- HTTP Archive’s trends in load times.
- Kenshoo’s post on Mobile paid search on Thanksgiving and Black Friday.
- Brad Frost’s article “Responsive Web Design: Missing the Point”.
