The Mobile Opportunity [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

Estimate Opportunity Size/Gauge ROI

Many businesses begin investing in mobile by rolling out a mobile optimized version of their site.  To take this step, you will need to justify the opportunity cost and ROI.  Here’s a simple way to size the opportunity for your business:

Step 1: Log in to SiteCatalyst and pull total page views for the site in question.   You will want to make sure the date range is sufficiently narrow to factor out recent growth in the market but wide enough to account for daily fluctuations.  A range between one and four weeks should be OK.  Total page views for the comparison week (4/12-4/18) were 134,499.

Step 2: Navigate to the mobile device reports for the same site and date range and pull the total page views for a specific Smartphone with good JavaScript support.  For the purposes of this example, we’ll use the iPhone.

During the comparison week (4/12-4/18) page views generated from iPhones were 1,340.

Step 3: Estimate iPhone market share for your industry and demographic. A recent Gartner report puts iPhone sales at 13% of total smartphone handset sales.  Based on data from Omniture customers, page views from iPhones are running between 10% and 20% of total page views.

Step 4: Estimate the mobile optimization opportunity by dividing iPhone page views by estimated market share for the iPhone: 1,340/.15 = 8,933.

Step 5: Estimate the mobile segment size by dividing the mobile optimization opportunity size by total pageviews: 8,933/134,499 = 6.6%.

Step 6 (Optional): Repeat Steps 1-5 for subsequent date ranges to discover the mobile adoption trend for your business.

In this example, launching a mobile optimized version of the site will positively impact the user experience for over 6% of the page views.  Estimating the optimization opportunity can also be performed for other performance indicators (e.g. revenue, leads, etc.) using the same methodology.  Given the poor experience visitors coming to the site on a mobile device may be having, the lift to KPIs for your business may be significant.  For example, at one site I visited recently using a mobile device; I was prompted to “upgrade my browser” and was unable to proceed past the warning.

As a caution, using the steps above to estimate the mobile optimization opportunity will understate the true opportunity because (1) accelerating future growth is not factored in-consider the chart below where the customer’s mobile views climbed 73% in five months (2) mobile promotion efforts may quickly extend the opportunity beyond current levels-for some customers, mobile drivers to key KPIs account for more than 30% of the total.

• Ed Hewett
• 2 responses
•  Web analytics, mobile analytics

• Share on   Digg Reddit Facebook MySpace StumbleUpon Propeller Slashdot Newsvine ma.gnolia
• Bookmark at   del.icio.us Technorati Google Bookmarks Yahoo Bookmarks Yahoo! My Web Windows Live Furl