Google Analytics: How to know if you need a website optimized for mobile

A recurring theme in recent months when consulting for companies of all sizes is the high percentage of traffic originating from mobile devices that many of them have, however in most cases the websites of these companies are not available. prepared to offer a good experience to users of mobile devices.

Nowadays it is very common to find websites whose percentage of mobile traffic exceeds 30% and even depending on the type of business it can exceed the traffic generated from desktop devices.

This means that if we do not have a mobile optimized website we may be wasting 1 in 3 visitors we receive, which of course seriously affects the contacts and sales generated.

How can we know if we need a mobile optimized website?

Luckily it is VERY easy to determine if it is time to optimize our website for mobile devices, all we need is Google Analytics.

Once we have entered Google Analytics we must select "Audience> Mobile> Overview".

With this we will obtain a report of the traffic we generate from desktops, mobiles and tablets.

We can see how on this particular website the 37.07% of traffic is generated from mobile devices and tablets, so not having it optimized for mobile devices would be a serious mistake.

It is also important to know the trend of traffic generated from mobile devices, since it is possible that today you are not receiving a lot of mobile traffic but that it is growing rapidly and soon you need a website optimized for mobile.

For this we can select a significant period of time, such as the last 12 months and then segment the session information to only show mobile and tablet traffic.

With this we will obtain the information of the visits coming from mobile devices and tablets in the last year.

In this particular case, at the beginning of 2014, traffic from mobile devices and tablets was only 19,96% of total traffic, while at the end of 2014, traffic from mobile devices represented 37,07% of total traffic.

This trend continues to rise, so it can be expected that by the end of 2015 the traffic coming from mobile devices will exceed 50% of the total traffic of this company.

This is a case where optimizing the website for mobile devices should be a high priority, as you can realize both short-term benefits by taking better advantage of the traffic generated today as well as preparing for the future.