Go Mobile or Go Home: But what do I do?

OK, so you don’t need to be told again – the world has gone mobile and if your strategy isn’t mobile first you should be brushing up your resume or else getting ready to live in an attic with the typewriter salesmen and Blackberry-holster makers… But let’s say you really want to keep your job – what should you do?

The good news is that Criteo has just released the Q2 State of Mobile Commerce Report, based on 1.4 billion individual ecommerce transactions worldwide. Alongside the latest data on mobile browser, in-app and cross-device commerce worldwide, there are some interesting new answers on how you can overhaul your strategy to become a mobile maestro. To start with though, one has to recognize the remarkable continued growth of mcommerce, which has now hit 30% of all US transactions:

So what should you do? There are three critical insights:

The first is that the quality of your mobile commerce site has a huge impact on conversion. While this might seem obvious, it is intriguing that quite subtle improvements in the site lead to measurable conversion improvements, as seen in this comparison:

The second is that mobile apps are just better. Conversion rates on apps are not only higher than mobile browser, but amazingly they are also higher than on the desktop:

Only a few retailers have made their app experience a priority. However those who have done this now generate almost 50 percent of their mobile transactions from their apps. Why does this happen? The main reason is not due to higher conversion rates from the basket. It is because apps deliver a much better browsing experience, and as a result consumers look at many more products – in just the same way that they browse another story from the Facebook newsfeed while killing time. Inevitably they like some of the products they see, and end up adding them to their basket. Conclusion: Visionary retailers simply must deliver an engaging app experience.

The third is the huge rise in cross-device consumer behavior. 40 percent of ecommerce transactions are now cross device, meaning your customer used multiple devices to access your site prior to purchase:

How many of these users do you think you correctly identified as the same person? Right now – probably nowhere near enough. So what do you need to do? If you want your marketing to be effective, your messaging needs to reflect all the interactions your consumer is having with you, which means as often as possible you need to correctly identify the user across devices. You also need to do this in order to correctly attribute the value of all your paid marketing.

Mobile commerce isn’t the future, it is the right now. And yes - it just is more complicated. The conclusion is simple - in this new mobile-enabled world, marketers need to keep pace with consumers or those consumers will end up elsewhere. 

For more details on this, and on other global mobile Commerce trends, take a look at Criteo's latest Mobile Commerce Report, released quarterly.