When it comes to mobile shopping habits, there is little room for error but high rewards to those who can meet user expectations.
The Mobile Journey
A new report recently published by progressive web app company Mobify will help a lot of mobile marketers prioritize their optimization efforts next year, as it shares some insightful findings on how mobile shoppers behave when browsing on their devices.
Firstly, when it comes to focusing on which pages you should be prioritizing your SEO efforts on, consider the fact that 68% of shoppers are landing on “non-product pages,” like blogs, a promotional page, or the homepage, and not actually the product page itself.
Image Source: Mobify
Another interesting piece of information included in this study is the time in which mobile users are actually spending on websites. While the average mobile viewing session lasts 5:45 minutes, 50% of those users are spending half that amount of time (less than three minutes) viewing your content, meaning your window is quite small to capitalize on mobile commerce.
Image Source: Mobify
In terms of where customers are spending the bulk of their time during that short window, the checkout page remains to be the biggest laggard.
A Higher Return Rate
Even though there is less time to drive the conversion, there are some strong benefits to gearing your website to mobile shoppers. The further that a mobile user gets through the purchasing funnel, the higher the chance they will return to make the purchase if they don’t make the transaction immediately.
The study breaks down “critical tipping points” which occur when a customer reaches the cart page. When this takes place, there is a 33% chance that customer will return to the website within a week.
Image Source: Mobify
Additionally, shoppers who go one step further through the funnel and add an item to their cart have a 2.6% return purchase rate within a week.
AMP-ing Up Your Efforts
With non-product pages being a very significant factor in capturing initial consumer interest, there is now a strong case to be made for upgrading your website’s content so that they can be transformed into accelerated mobile pages (AMP).
Google has stated that AMP pages are not currently a ranking factor, but there are still a couple of considerable benefits to support making the change. First of all, content pieces like blog articles and promotional pages (which the report states are key entry points) make great pieces for AMP content, which are typically seen to provide information and news-like updates. The second thing to realize is that Google allocates space for these pages when users are conducting mobile searches. So even though it’s not going to help your ranking placement, the reality is that you’ll still have real estate to leverage on Google that would have not been available otherwise.
A third point to make – and perhaps a more obvious one – is that these pages are designed to load fast, which will only aid your efforts to make the biggest impact on your shoppers in the smallest amount of time.
Driving Mobile Conversions
There are two primary takeaways to think about with these findings as we move into 2019. To begin, start shifting the mindset that product pages are the be-all-end-all of your SEO efforts. Clearly they are a significant factor and should always receive attention, but they aren’t likely to be where your mobile shoppers are landing.
To win those users over, start re-examining your homepage and informational content hubs like your website’s blog or news section. If you can’t make the upgrade to AMP, you can at least monitor page speeds and ensuring you’re spending a portion of time reducing load times.
As for the checkout process itself, 2019 is a great year to ease this process on the mobile front. The closer you can get to a one-step checkout process, the better your chances of making the sale.
If you have any questions about checkout best practices, feel free to reach out to us. Our client services team is constantly on-top of the latest trends, and they’ll be happy to give you insight on what you can be doing to maximize your digital revenue.