The great people over at eMarketer are always posting some relevant information about marketing measurement and this was a really informative one all about what marketers understand about how their visitors use mobile. As eMarketer estimates, “Mobile ad spending in the US will jump 50.0% this year to reach $28.72 billion, or 49.0% of digital ad spending.” That’s huge and more of a reason why people should understand how their customers interact with them digitally.

So they dove into this poll by Adobe and Econsultancy in their Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing: The Quest for Mobile Excellence to find out just how much marketers know about measuring their mobile spend.

Highlights and Our Take

• 33% don’t even know what % of their traffic is mobile. Easy to see in Google Analytics
• 34% said they had ‘a defined mobile strategy that goes out at least 12 months’, down from 36% who agreed with this statement last year. Bummer, this number should never go down.
• Of those, 30% don’t know the device breakout of their visitors. Easy to see in Google Analytics. See our case study below.
• 71% say that the desktop website is their top priority when it comes to providing a consistent customer experience, ahead of mobile site (16%), smartphone applications (10%) and tablet apps (3%). We can’t believe that only 16% are considering a mobile site as a top priority considering how easy it is to get one!
• 

  With a simple look at the Dasheroo Sessions By Device Type insight we saw a huge spike in mobile traffic and tracked it back to our Facebook Ads!

  37% don’t understand how people use phones differently than tablets. Increasingly important as you build out your mobile applications.

A Short Dasheroo Case Study: Measuring Mobile Advertising

One component of our launch in May was a series of Facebook Ads across both desktop and mobile. Why not right? More eyeballs = more users! So we started to see a huge spike in traffic, specifically mobile visitors from Facebook. Many of these visitors signed up to use Dasheroo (great!) However overall our conversion after they signed up to interact with our business dashboards application was very low compared to other channels.

What we found was the since our website is optimized for mobile people signed up expecting to have a great customer experience with our application as well. However we do not yet have a mobile application so our current app is optimized for desktop only.

Mobile users expected to have a great customer experience across the board but they were stopped short when they got to our application.

What did we do? We pulled the Facebook Ads for Mobile until we launch our mobile application.

We continued running the desktop feed and our conversion rates increased immediately. Did we get the traffic we once got? No way but the quality of it was incredibly better.

Lesson learned on mobile measurement.