Should we still care about tablets or are they already yesterday’s tech?

How do you consume your day-to-day media? Are you someone who’s glued to their phone? Or are you still very much a desktop/laptop person?

Now how many of you said tablet?

Tablets are a funny ol’ thing, and they date back further than many of us might realise. While for many of us, Apple’s iPad signalled the first really consumer-friendly tablet we could all have in our home, the first device we could conceivably class as a tablet first showed its face way back in 1968.

The Dynabook was conceived as a portable computer (and looked sort of like an open laptop you couldn’t close) originally designed for children to consume digital media. However, it was just a little too ahead of its time and was shelved due to technical limitations.

We then had the GRiDPad, Tandy Zoomer (yes, really), Apple Newton MessagePad, Microsoft Tablet PC, and a few other precursors that didn’t breakthrough into the mainstream market. We also had the first iteration of Amazon’s Kindle in 2007.

Then along came the iPad in 2010, and just like the iPhone in 2007, completely revolutionised the market. It looked sexy, ran like a dream, and had a huge library of apps to mess around with. You probably didn’t need one, but by God you wanted one.

Of course we’ve since had an explosion of tablets; the incremental updates every 8 hours from Apple, as well as the other big hitters like Samsung, Microsoft and Google wading in with their own models.

Despite this boom, it would seem that our interest and enthusiasm might be dwindling a little. Are we no longer impressed by tablets, or have our phones rendered them obsolete.

Out of touch(screen)

If we have a look at Google Trends for the term ‘iPad’, we can see a pretty significant decrease in search volume over the past five years.

Compare that to search volumes for ‘iPhone’ and you can clearly see the difference in the interest levels of the two devices.

Sure, there may be various reasons for the difference, but it does suggest that the iPad doesn’t have the same lasting interest.

This is also reflected in iPad sales figures (yes we’re using the iPad again, but it’s a pretty good yardstick). According to Statista, the iPad’s sales are on a pretty sharp decline. Apple’s fiscal year starts in October, meaning their Q1 numbers include Christmas, and are therefore the highest of the year. However, Q1 iPad sales have been in decline since 2014, almost exactly halving from 26.04 million to 13.08 million in 2017. In fact, this year is the poorest Q1 performance since 2011.

Here are each quarter’s sales figures going back to 2010 if you’re interested…

With technology, this trend is nothing new, and part of that decline will be down to market saturation. Simply put, once people have bought an iPad, there are fewer people likely to buy them going forward. And it seems there’s no slowing down in people producing apps.

In the interests of fairness and thorough reporting, here’s the global tablet market share by vendor, which shows that more people don’t have iPads than do, but Apple is still ahead of any other single manufacturer.

However, the fact remains that tablets are not creating as much buzz as they once were. But are we still using them?

Tablet vs desktop vs mobile stats

Regardless of whether sales are declining, there are still a hell of a lot of tablets in homes already. But are we using them, or are they just being left to gather dust while we browse the web on other devices?

Let’s take a look. We trawled through Google Analytics data for our a whole host of our clients going back to 2011 and ran it through Supermetrics. The result was this graph showing the percentage of sessions by device:

Obviously the biggest takeaway from this is the switch from desktop to mobile, but we’re here to look at tablet traffic. We can see that up until the end of 2013, tablet usage was growing and was actually higher than mobile usage.

Then we have this graph showing revenue by device for the same period…

It tells a very similar story. Desktop is usurped by mobile, with tablet trailing off somewhat. However, it’s not quite as dramatic as the sessions by device stats, suggesting that when it comes to actually making a purchase, all devices play their part, including tablet.

As seen in both graphs, at the back end of 2013, we seemed to hit an important milestone. Mobile usage skyrocketed and desktop took a plunge, while tablet also started a slow but steady decline.

This actually corresponds with the iPad sales trends we highlighted earlier in the article, peaking in Q1 2014 (which if you’ll remember is the end of 2013 for Apple). Could it be that we were so enamoured with this new tech for a couple of years but soon got fed up with it?

September 2012 saw the release of iOS 6, which no longer supported the original iPad, and this is around the time that the percentage of tablet traffic started to plateau. By the start of 2014 maybe those early adopters didn’t like that their devices were no longer supported, but they didn’t want to pay for a brand new iPad. All conjecture, but a possibility.

2012/13 also heralded the release of the iPhone 5, which became the world’s fastest-selling smartphone. Perhaps this was the moment mobile really took off, leaving everything else in its wake.

So that’s a look at some historical data, but how about how we’re using tablets right now? According to the usage graph above, tablet usage has levelled off and might be showing early signs of a resurgence.

Using DeepCrawl’s handy new Search Console integration, we can take a look at the clicks, impressions and position of keywords for a given page on a site. If we take a look at the homepage for one of our clients over the past 90 days, we get the following:

From there, we can see that tablets make up just 12% of all impressions and 17% of clicks, with mobile coming out on top as we’d expect.

It turns out that the time of day has a significant effect on our device usage too….

As the above image from Smart Insights shows, tablet usage peaks late evening, and actually overtakes both smartphone and desktop usage. This could be down to people browsing in bed before going to sleep, but could also include those using their tablets to watch TV and movies. More evidence that tablets are still important.

Should we still care about tablet traffic?

Absolutely!

While tablet traffic only represents a relatively small percentage of overall usage, as shown in the graphs above, that’s still a hefty number of people, and if you’re a business then those people are potential customers.

There is also evidence to suggest that conversion rate is actually higher for tablet than it is for smartphone, as highlighted by the following from Smart Insights…

Desktop still reigns when it comes to conversion rate, but tablet isn’t that far behind. My best guess for the reason behind this is twofold: 1) Buyers find making purchases on their smartphones fiddly and cumbersome; 2) People might prefer to make purchases in the comfort and privacy of their own home, which increases the likelihood they’ll use desktop or tablet.

There is also a lot of chatter about cross-device buying cycles, suggesting many people like to research products and services on one device before completing the purchase on another at a different time. Tablet is clearly still a part of that process.

This reinforces the fact that all websites should now be optimised for mobile devices, including tablets. Google’s separate mobile index is apparently imminent, so any websites not optimising for those devices could well get left behind.

If you want to check what your website looks like and how it works on tablet devices, then BrowserStack is a fantastic way of doing do. Below you can see what Interaction looks like on an iPad Pro running iOS 10.3, and there are various other tablets and mobile devices you can choose from to test functionality.

An alternative is to use the Google Chrome Developer Console to spoof which device you want to have a look at.

When it comes to the higher keyword position we were seeing on tablet compared to mobile, this could be a huge opportunity to capture tablet users — are your meta descriptions as good as they good be? Could you include reviews in your results? If you’re appearing much higher in tablet SERPS, then you need to encourage those users to click through.

If it turns out that your website doesn’t look or run well on tablet then you may need to investigate these problems and rectify them, or you could be losing out on vital customers.

Before anyone tells you that a mobile site will magically push you up the SERPs, there’s no special ranking boost for websites that are mobile responsive. However, it makes perfect sense that if your site is easier to use on mobile devices, then more people are likely to interact with it and use it over sites that aren’t optimised. And this should give you a boost in the SERPs.

Where next for tablets?

So where will tablets go from here? Well they’re not likely to go anywhere, but they’ll have to evolve in some way to keep people’s interests.

Part of the problem with early tablets was that they were too focused on being full mobile computers, and simply couldn’t handle the OS or didn’t have the same level of functionality. As technology has caught up, it seems we’re heading back in that direction. The Microsoft Surface and iPad Pro are somewhat of a hybrid, bridging that gap between tablets and laptops.

Apple are due to release iOS 11 this autumn, and some believe this could be the one that really allows iPads to compete with laptops.

It would seem this is going to have to happen if tablets are going to evolve and stay on people’s radar.

Mobile phones can do most of what a tablet can do, and they fit in our pockets. Most of them anyway. The Plus versions of the iPhone and other larger models such as the new Samsung Galaxy Note 8 aren’t far off being small tablets, so why would someone with limited income shell out for both?

Tablets are likely to still be considered luxury items for many, rather than something essential like a smartphone, and even sales in that section of industry are slowing. Dixons Carphone recently reported a huge fall in profits which they have attributed to incremental changes in new models and the falling value of the pound, meaning people are hanging onto their older handsets for longer.

However, as long as people are still buying them and using them, it’s essential that businesses cater for them online. This means having responsive websites that work across all devices, big and small; it means correctly optimising your website for search on tablet; it means building apps for different operating systems.

Probably the biggest challenge we face as digital marketers, and one of the most exciting parts of the job, is reacting to the landscape as it changes. Tablets are still important, and we need to cater for them — but we also need to be ready for whatever comes next. Who knows what that will be?

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