Mobile vs desktop: find out where your traffic comes from

Having a website that is optimized for mobile devices is a must. Around 50% of Google searches are made on mobile devices, and mobile users tend to spend longer on a website than desktop users. Mobile usability has also been a ranking factor since the Mobile Update of 2015. If your website is not optimized for mobile, you could be missing out on valuable traffic and conversions.

With our updated improved devices report in Search Success, you can clearly see how many users reach your website on mobile or desktop, how many keywords you’re ranking for on each device, and in which countries mobile usage is higher.

The report is split into 5 parts:

Clicks by devices

See the proportion of your website’s mobile and desktop traffic as a percentage. This is great for giving you a current status of your traffic share. For agencies or freelancers, it’s ideal for getting a first overview of a new website. It can also help you set goals, for example aim to increase your share of mobile traffic by a certain percentage. You can review your performance in more detail with "History" (see below).

Figure 1: Clicks by devices

Keyword amount by device

In this section, you can see how many of your keywords are ranking on mobile and desktop. The data is presented as a venn diagram that visualizes the overlap of the 2 sets, and to see a full list of the keywords, you can click on "view all keywords". Are there any keywords you know for sure you want to be ranking on mobile? If these are not in your list of keywords ranking for mobile, you can add this to your to do list for optimizing.

Figure 2: Keyword amount by device

History

Find out how your traffic is developing on mobile and desktop, and see mobile and desktop traffic directly compared. You can filter the data according to clicks, impressions, CTR and position.

Figure 3: History

Easily track your improvements in your mobile optimization as you see your share of mobile traffic increasing. You will also be able to see how specific events such as Google updates impact your mobile and desktop traffic respectively.

Performance comparison

In this section of the report, you can compare key search performance indicators on mobile and desktop. For example, keywords ranking on page 1, keywords ranking on page 1 without clicks, impressions, CTR and position.

Figure 4: Performance comparison

See in which aspects you already perform well on mobile, and get clear insights on which aspects you need to work on. For example, if your CTR is lower on mobile than desktop, making sure your meta descriptions are short (but meaningful) is one way of improving, as Google displays shorter meta descriptions for mobile than for desktop.

Countries

Get an overview of your desktop and mobile traffic per country. In this section, the data is presented as a colour-coded map - if your impressions are 50% higher on a mobile device, the country will be shown in light blue, if you have more traffic on desktop, it’s displayed in dark blue. The countries with the highest amount of mobile traffic are displayed as a list.

Figure 5: Countries

Use this for getting an impression of your brand’s mobile performance on an international scale. This can help you to derive measures where you need to improve, for example aiming to receive over 50% traffic on mobile devices for your target markets. Knowing where the majority of your traffic comes from can also help you to ensure your website is sufficiently optimized for mobile or desktop accordingly.

Conclusion

Knowing the status of your mobile and desktop traffic is an important starting point for any webmaster for deriving measures about mobile optimization. No matter the share of traffic per mobile and desktop, it’s important to ensure a good user experience on all devices. In this ebook, you can find out everything you need to know about how to make sure your website is optimized for mobile usage.