Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Measured by shopping channel experience, here’s the breakdown of where smartphone owners are very satisfied: :60% -- Store56% -- Desktop47% -- Mobile24% -- Social.

This matters, since almost three quarters (73%) of smartphone owners spend five or more hours a week using their phone to research products, find stores or make a purchase, and more than half (51%) spend 10 hours or more.

As yet another indicator that mobile influences sales well in advance of a store visit, more than half (55%) of smartphone owners said they researched products via mobile prior to visiting a store.

When they get to the store, that doesn’t mean a sale there is inevitable. More than four in 10 (42%) researched products and alternatives on their smartphone during a store visit....

Despite brands’ insistence that they are producing responsive sites that work across platforms, nearly half of UK and US respondees to a new survey said that the mobile websites that they visit regularly are not optimised for mobile devices.

And it seems brands that fail to comply are playing a dangerous game too since more than half of the respondents from the UK (51%) and US (62%) said that they would leave a website if such content wasn’t optimised for their device.

The conclusions are drawn from Netbiscuits' People’s Web Report II, a global study of 6,000 web users in six countries that details their online behaviours and preferences, and come at a time that marketers are under increased pressure to ensure their websites are optimised for a plethora of devices and screens. Such a need comes after Google changed its mobile search algorithms earlier this month.

The study also showed how consumers are becoming more willing to trade their information in exchange for a better experience - something that could potentially make the job of the marketer easier....

Last Holiday season was a tipping point for mobile: Traffic surged to mobile shopping sites and apps. M-sites crashed from the onslaught of shoppers. And people got comfortable not only researching but also purchasing gifts on mobile.

Looking at our own data, we saw that people on Facebook bought on mobile 46% more during the last Holiday season than during the non-Holiday season.1 Facebook IQ predicts that in Q4 of this year the percentage of online purchasers transacting on a mobile device will rise by 30%.2

The mobile shift has happened, and the thumb is in charge. For the second post in a series examining what this means for brands, Kelly Graziadei, Facebook’s Direct Response Product Marketing Director, spoke to Helen Crossley, Facebook IQ’s Head of Consumer Insights Research, about 3 of the most common questions marketers ask about how to succeed in mobile commerce...