When is the last time you worried that you weren’t doing enough to optimize your website for your audience? If you’re a marketer, the odds are that it’s constantly on your mind. From SEO rankings to page speed to on-page content, we think about how search engines and users will interact with our website and what we can do to optimize those experiences.
But are you making research-backed decisions for your website based on which devices your users are primarily using?
The truth is there are a lot of assumptions about mobile users versus desktop users. For example, how they interact with websites, what they spend their time doing, and what will make them more likely to convert.
Assumptions aren’t facts, though.
Fortunately, website analytics tools like Ubersuggest make it possible for us to find out the truth.
So, before you go ahead and make assumptions about what devices your visitors are using and how they’re interacting with your site, consider the data we’ve outlined below.
What Is Assumed About Mobile Vs. Desktop Users
For marketers, there are a lot of assumptions made about mobile vs desktop users. Are those assumptions warranted?
According to the State of Mobile in 2024, more time than ever (4.8 hours per day) is being spent in mobile apps. That makes sense when we look at the mobile landscape in 2021, with mobile users downloading 435,000 apps per minute.
Mobile has continued to grow in share each year. As of September 2022, the worldwide split among mobile, desktop, and tablet users was 58.72%, 39.18%, and 2.1%, respectively. The numbers are slightly different from a UAverage time on site, on average, was 40% longer on desktop than mobile.
Mobile has the highest bounce rate (52.11% globally) when compared to desktop and tablet.
Desktop is still in the lead when it comes to conversions, with desktop at 3.7% and mobile at 2.2%.
With all this said, desktop versus mobile statistics are constantly changing, so it’s best to optimize for both mobile and desktop experiences.
We Analyzed Mobile Vs. Desktop Users
To gain a greater understanding of how device usage varies by industry, we’ve analyzed nine businesses across four industries – one cryptocurrency, one SaaS, four E-Commerce, and three B2B. When analyzing the websites, we focused on four main metrics:
Mobile users (all traffic)
Desktop users (all traffic)
Mobile users (organic traffic)
Desktop users (organic traffic)
For seven of the nine websites, we collected data over a 12-month period from September 2021 to September 2022. The other two time periods will be indicated when discussing results below.
Cryptocurrency: Mobile-Dominated
For the cryptocurrency website we analyzed, we used metrics from April 20th, 2022 through October 4th, 2022. Here’s what we found.
When looking at all traffic sources, 78.22% of traffic was mobile. This leaves 20.59% being from desktop traffic. As for organic traffic only, 63.92% was mobile, while the remaining was desktop..S.-only perspective, with a breakdown of 46% mobile, 50% desktop, and 4% tablet.
What are mobile users spending time on, exactly?
Social media, unsurprisingly, is a big one with 80% of social media usage coming from mobile devices. That’s not the only mobile-heavy activity, though. Other activities with greater than 80% of mobile-only usage are couponing and checking the weather.
What about desktop users?
Desktop users spend more time visiting websites than their mobile counterparts. From banking to real estate to travel, desktop users perform more in-depth research than mobile users as a whole.
That’s not to say they’re sealing the deal on desktop, though.
According to Merchant Savvy’s Global Mobile report, 58% of all multi-device purchases use mobile to close the sale. So, whether they started on desktop or tablet, they’re ending up on a mobile device to make the purchase more than half of the time.
Beyond activities, though, it’s also important to note the different habits of mobile users and desktop users.
A few key metrics have major differences between mobile and desktop users. Namely, mobile vs desktop conversion rates which show that desktop users tend to visit more pages (3.95) than mobile (2.67) and tablet users (3.21). Other important metrics to consider include: