Mobile is an important and growing traffic source for all publishers, but just how much traffic does it represent?
I was curious where things currently stand so I pulled mobile traffic figures from SimilarWeb for a variety of well-known brands.
I started with the sites surveyed in my post on search and social traffic and then added several more newspaper, magazine and content sites, for a total of 70 brands.
These are all sites that we currently work with so I’m going to keep the titles anonymous. But if you have a SimilarWeb PRO subscription you can pull this data for any site.
On average, for the past six months (May-October 2014) mobile visits accounted for 40% of total site traffic for this group.
Here’s a breakdown by percentile. The highest figure was 70% and the lowest was 25%:
| Average Mobile Traffic | Number of Sites |
|---|---|
| Less than 20% | 0 |
| 20-29% | 6 |
| 30-39% | 31 |
| 40-49% | 23 |
| 50-59% | 6 |
| 60-69% | 3 |
| 70-79% | 1 |
I also divided the sites into topical categories to see if there were any significant differences. Here are the averages for each category:
| Category | Average Mobile Traffic (May-Oct 2014) |
|---|---|
| Entertainment | 52% |
| Health | 50% |
| Food | 43% |
| Fashion and Beauty | 42% |
| Home and Lifestyle | 39% |
| Sports | 38% |
| News | 34% |
| Travel | 32% |
An added note is that sites with a younger demographic tended to have a higher mobile percentage. There was not a consistent pattern for sites with a larger male or female audience.
Justin MacDonald says
Shows that mobile is already massive and only getting bigger. People will most likely still need computers for a very long time, but many people are doing work or games on their computers and searching on their downtime in the car, restaurants, etc. This just means that you HAVE to have a good mobile site!
Mick Kennys says
I think it is normal way of technology development. With all of those phones and tablets we are browsing internet during morning breakfest, in the bed, in the bed, during bathroom private time 🙂 etc.
adam lurie says
On all sites I see the analytic reports show monthly growth of mobile and device users so that along with Google’s mobile driven algorithm update in April 2015 its defiantly time to make sure your website is responsive and easily view-able on display sizes I can also see major benefits of having a mobile specific website.