Since enabling the mobile interface, I can now track how many visits are from mobile browsers. In the past three weeks, mobile visits represent 16% of total site vists. In that period there were 12173 desktop hits and 2410 mobile hits. As an analyst, I have to ponder what this means. My take on these stats is:
- Mobile represents a significant amount of traffic even for a text heavy site like mine.
- Since I did almost nothing to publicize the mobile site, I can assume this ratio will grow in favor of mobile access.
- It is possible that many visitors were accessing Tom’s Tech Take II from mobile devices but it wasn’t being tracked. Given how hard the site would have been to read even from a tablet, I doubt it was significant but at least some of the 16% was always there and likely some is new.
- This is after a large portion of the content and traffic shifted to the Neuralytix site in August. In many cases it’s the same content (though not all) but some visitors continue to come here and others prefer the Neuralytix site.
- Since there are fewer bots that will register as “mobile” the visits are more likely to be real humans and not software agents.
This is, to me, an indicator of a larger trend. More and more information is consumed on tablets, communication happens on smartphones, and more involved work on desktops. Given that, I expect mobile visits to rise at just about site. This favors text heavy content given the difficulties presented with rich media on limited platforms with bandwidth constraints. Perhaps the age of good writing is returning.