Content marketers who don’t embrace mobile strategies risk missing out on a quarter of their potential audience, according to a new study from Google that shines a light on exactly how users are consuming content and searching for the things they need across various devices.
The How People Use Their Devices: What Marketers Need to Know report aims to provide “important context” for user behaviour to help marketers “understand the reality of the customer journey.” It is no surprise that Google notes that we now live in a “mobile-first world.”
More than one in four users only use a smartphone for their content needs during the day, which is twice as many as those who only use a desktop. While mobile is king, people are generally juggling more devices and are happy to move back and forth between them to get things done. Smartphones currently have the highest average daily usage time at 170 minutes, followed by computers (120 minutes) and tablets (75 minutes).
Search trends
When looking specifically at search, 39 per cent of users solely use a smartphone to find products and information on Google. Mobile search is rising across various categories also, as auto (+30 per cent), apparel (+40 per cent), travel (+25 per cent) and consumer electronics (+40 per cent) have all seen significant year-on-year growth.
Google has also revealed the key search trends that are soaring in popularity on mobile. For the automobile industry, search terms for hybrid and alternative vehicles, campers and RVs and vans and minivans have all grown by more than 40 per cent during the last 12 months.
Moving on to mobile app usage, users interact with nearly five of these every day. Email apps, social apps and messaging apps take up the lion’s share of usage, but three in ten fire up travel and local apps when they are at home during the evening. This is the time when overall mobile browsing time peaks throughout the day. While mobile dovetails with an on-the-go lifestyle, home is currently the place where people use their smartphones the most during the average day, ahead of work, stores and restaurants and bars.
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