Over half of the searches on Google are already coming from a mobile phone. If you look at travel (destinations), over 60 % of traffic is coming from mobile.
Consumers are engaging a lot with apps and they do spend a lot of time inside apps, but scaling apps is difficult (about 50 % of all app downloads are coming from 13 % of users). We are seeing an interesting trend, where consumers are actually downloading less apps (the average app download now on a monthly base in the US is „0“).
If we re-imagine our mobile platforms and look at what consumers want. Are consumers getting what they want? Google doesn’t think so. There certainly is a gap.
Apps offer huge levels of capability in terms of engagement with the user (speed, notifications, UI).
The Mobile Web doesn’t necessarily offer the same sort of capabilities, but what it does offer is privacy and flexibility. Users are searching on mobile phones and are now visiting more than a 100 mobile websites a month. Users want that flexibility on the mobile web, they want the ability to explore.
What can we do to re-imagine the mobile web and to get the capabilities of an App (UI, speed etc.) into the mobile web experience. There are two technologies you can implement right now.
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): Speed is king on the mobile web. Research illustrates, that 53 % of the consumers will drop out of your mobile web, if the site does not load in 3 seconds. Google worked with an open source product around „Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)“. Results are outstanding and Google is seeing a 4x increase in speed and a 10x decline in the amount of data required to load a mobile site. This is an amazing opportunity for all website owners.
- Progressive Web Apps: The goal of progressive web apps is to unlock the potential of the modern web browser on your mobile phone to make what was previously all locked into the app (notification, UI, speed). The native app and the native mobile website should look and feel the same. Tests show, that push notifications from a mobile web in retail space outperform commercially push notifications from apps. This technology also allows a mobile site to be cached and used offline.
It’s our responsibility, that we are reacting to what consumers want.
(Source: via @WebInTravel – Get full details at https://vimeo.com/190077478 )