Don't You See What's Happening?

2014 marked the first year in which internet usage on mobile devices surpassed internet usage on PC's.

Mobile devices now account for 60% of Internet usage in the United States as of May 2014. Of that 60%, mobile applications account for 51% of usage, while mobile browsers only accounted for 9% of usage, leaving desktop internet usage at an all time low of 40%.

I want you to really think about what's happening here. When is the last time you even used a PC for something that wasn't work related? Mobile internet is absolutely dominating usage vs desktop computers.

To further the conversation, the graphic above shows us the monthly usage of mobile apps and mobile web browsers for men and women in the United States.

It seems that only 11% of their time spent on media is through the mobile web, and that number is continuing to decrease. As for mobile applications, they are taking up 89% of our media consumption are continuing to rise.

Is Your Website Irrelevant?

Let's talk about one of the biggest brands out there right now:

Under Amour is the first name you think of when it comes to high quality athletic apparel. Have you ever been on their website? I haven't. Can you buy their products on their website? Probably, but I haven't ever checked. I'm willing to bet that right now, most of you have the same answers to these questions that I do.

Makes you wonder....

How can I own so many products from such a huge brand and have never, ever been on their website? Are they reaching me some other way? (Spoiler Alert: The answer is yes.)

We can clearly see in the table above that Facebook reigns as the most popularly used mobile application, beating out the Google Play store by nearly 25% higher reach to all mobile users in the United States.

Let's think about this for a second. More people are accessing the internet on their phones than on desktop computers, and they are using mobile applications as opposed to using their mobile browsers.

So I suppose that begs the question.......

Is this more relevant,

than this?

Yes, I went to the Under Armour website for the first time...

There are more people than ever using their mobile devices to access the internet, and these people aren't using their mobile browsers to do so. They live inside of their apps, and as evidenced by the data above, they aren't going anywhere. They aren't leaving Facebook to go to the Under Armour website, which means that most people aren't going to the Under Armour website to buy products that they see in their Facebook posts.

So that's a problem right?

People aren't buying Under Armour's products directly from Facebook, once the "like" or share happens, the story comes to an end. Take a look to the right at some of the comments from recent post by Under Armour.

These comments are from a typical post by Under Armour, an athlete in action wearing their products. The post has gotten 1.7k likes and 25 different comments.

Now as you're reading through the comments you can see that poor Derek wants to learn more about the shirt and shorts that were in the post and he has absolutely no way to do so. He liked the post, left a comment, and then that was it. Derek wanted to buy the products in this post and he couldn't find any more information on where to get them.

Now if more people are interacting with your Facebook posts as opposed to the content on your website, and on top of that people are clearly interested in buying the products in your Facebook posts don't you think that you should do something about that? I know I would.

If I see something on Facebook that I want to buy or learn more about I should be able to do so right from that page, if I have to scour the web looking for that product I'm likely to give up my search and never go back again.

Shouldn't our posts look more like this? With the option to learn more about and buy the products that we see, as we see them?

The reach of mobile applications will only continue to grow, while mobile browsers will remain an extremely small segment of how we use our phones to access online media. With a shift like this happening how can we continue to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on huge, flashy eCommerce websites? Shouldn't we have more of a native solution where consumers can not only interact with and share our products through apps like Facebook, but be able to buy them with one click as well?

More on that in my next post :)

About the Author

Ryan Bilak is a Sales Engineer at Jyllion, you can connect with him on Twitter or here on LinkedIn, or just click the follow button at the top of the page here.