05 January 2010
Posted in Online Marketing
Given some of the prominent news stories of 2009, you would be forgiven for thinking that your mobile internet presence is going to play a major part in the success of your business this year.
I'll let you into a little secret: it's not.Here's why..
Rightmove's iPhone app is one of the most popular lifestyle apps in the iTunes App store and has had a quarter of a million downloads or so. Before launching it, according to MobiAD News, Rightmove receive only 85,000 or so mobile visitors in total, the vast majority of which were iPhone users.
Now, they are seeing 50,000 searches a day.
Does that sound like a lot?
Compare it to their Twitter announcement of a new daily record of 22.8 million pages viewed on January 3rd 2010 alone!
We're talking fractions of a percent here. Numbers that are too small and expensive for even the most modern independent estate agents to justify chasing.
So, for 2010 at least, you are perfectly safe to leave the hard work of chasing mobile users to the major portals and focus your efforts and budget towards visitors to your normal website instead.
Also do we have any details about tracking? I would have thought that the iPhone application sends search queries to an XML feed or something similar. Tracking that is totally different to tracking direct hits on a website from a mobile device. I refer to my point about other smart phones. If usability is poor, they won't come back.
I love the iPhone but it has caused something of a trend where instead of developing a mobile friendly web site, companies will waste time and money on targeting just one demographic. Releasing an iPhone specific application, there is no need for it. Also, why on earth would I want a throw away iPhone application just eating up SSD space? I would rather visit their web site, oh, I can't because it isn't optimised for mobiles.
Considering Nokia still has the leading market share, just focussing your efforts on iPhone users doesn't make any sense.
Mobile friendly sites do make money and are worth the time developing but businesses make the mistake of using them as mini versions of their full site. You have to consider what circumstance the end user might be looking at a mobile version of your web site.
Maybe the wife has emailed some housing details to her husband and wants his opinion, he is out on lunch or not at his PC and views it on his smart phone. You don't need to give all the details of that property. Large image, bulleted list of important details, location and price will do, considering what he is viewing it on.
Sat at the bus stop in the morning, "Oh I didn't pay that bill!". Get your phone out and use the mobile version of their web site to pay it before the number 34 turns up.
It is simple considerations like that, that will win you repeat visits.
Also, although mobile devices have had web browsers installed on them, they have always been inferior to desktop PC versions. With Apple making Safari on the iPhone pretty much a fully capable web browser is helping push mobile devices as viable devices for people to browse the internet on.
Opera has released a beta version of their latest mobile web browser and it looks fantastic: http://www.opera.com/mini/next/
Also Mozilla, the makers of Firefox are developing Fennec: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/fennec/1.0a1/releasenotes/
Internet browsing is still fairly new on mobile devices because of the poor implementation of web browsers and also because businesses have been slow to adapt.
I am a freelance web designer and I am currently working with an estate agent, one of my suggestions was to look into a mobile version of their web site. We both agreed that there is a benefit for having one developed, even the agents themselves said that it would be useful if they could view their property portfolio on their mobile to show clients whilst out and about.
I might also add the recent rumour that Google will be allowing people and agents to upload properties on to their map facilities will also have an effect on mobile device usage. Google have gone to considerable effort to make all of their services mobile friendly and also "Geo-aware". So I can search for proprieties within a 20 mile radius of where I am sat, filtering out all the normal annoyances of drop down selectors that you commonly find on estate agents web sites to actually find what you are looking for.
I might be travelling and think to myself "This is a nice area, wonder how much property goes for around here?" Get the phone out and use Google Maps to help me find any houses on the market.
Just to dismiss mobile friendly web sites based upon a select amount of users, that Rightmove have boxed themselves into, isn't looking at the bigger picture.
You are quite right that the iPhone only represents a tiny portion of mobile phone users at the moment. I think the important thing is that, in Rightmove's experience at least, iPhone users represent the majority of their mobile traffic.
They haven't boxed themselves into iPhone users only either. Both they and Globrix have dedicated mobile websites:
http://mobile.rightmove.co.uk
http://mobile.globrix.com
It'd be interesting to know who the agency you are working for are and what ROI they are expecting to see on their mobile investment in the coming years. Is that information you can share?
Don't get me wrong - the mobile internet is definitely set to grow. I just don't think it's easy to justify spending on it during 2010. In 2011, who knows?
At this point, it's probably worth saying that we don't ignore the mobile web anyway. PropertyADD comes with basic mobile phone optimised web pages for texting out more interesting property matches to smart phones, straight out of the box.
We've also recently been made aware of a US company looking to build iPhone apps on a pay as you go basis: http://redfoundry.com/. Watching a demo of how simple it is to plug in an RSS feed like we provide does make it affordable enough to become potentially interesting.
There's no right and wrong in all of this, but the blog topic was intended to deflate the hype balloon a little!
Martin
As for ROI, I guess it depends on who you employee to actually build you a mobile friendly site. As I said, I am a freelancer so my quotes are very reasonable. I am confident that they could recoup the money spent within a few months. Long-term projections, haven't got that far yet.
With the right online strategy I am confident it will increase their web site traffic at least. Once built I intend to make sure that people are aware of the facility, something I neglected to mention in my first post. Majority of mobile sites are just sort of stumbled upon if you happen to enter a URL or click a link on your mobile device. To this day I still find it a novelty and a welcome surprise when I hit a mobile friendly web site. I don't think businesses brag about them enough.
To go ahead and invest in a mobile friendly site is quite considerate I think.
Something that I have been eyeing up a lot recently are frameworks. Quite tempted to have a play around with a few.
iWebKit: http://www.iwebkit.net/
WebApp: http://webapp-net.com/
jQTouch: http://www.jqtouch.com/
As long as they are compatible with the majority of devices available, I would much prefer them than an installed application.