60 Percent of Online Traffic Now Comes From Mobile

If your business depends upon online traffic, you should know. More than half of digital traffic online now comes from mobile devices and through mobile apps.

A comScore report says smartphones and tablets combined now account for 6o percent of all online traffic up from 50 percent a year ago. And 51 percent of that traffic is driven by mobile apps (like those for digital radio such as Pandora or Spotify, digital messaging like WhatsApp or Viber and social apps like Facebook and Twitter.)

Significantly, this is a very different measure than the amount of organic traffic driven by mobile, as cited in another recent report from SEO platform BrightEdge.

That study suggested that about 23 percent of organic traffic to websites now originates from Android or iPhone devices while 12 percent comes from tablets. But this report looked only at traffic originating from mobile search, in other words, someone looking for something using a search engine like Google or Bing via their phone or tablet.

The comScore report examines a much broader cross section of online traffic. It could just as easily be looking at visitors delivered to your website via a link on a Facebook app as from a mobile search for your business on a search engine.

One conclusion is that, while categories like digital radio and photo sites like Instagram and Flickr may draw more activity, for marketers (and small businesses) social media is most important.

In it’s official report, comScore explains:

“While social networking does not rank at the very top of this list among the most mobile-skewing content categories, it is arguably the most important. The #1 category in terms of overall digital engagement accounting for 20% of total digital time spent, social networking now generates more than 70% of its activity on mobile. When considering the category’s contribution to total digital ad spending, its rapid shift to mobile marks an important sign of the times for the Internet economy.”

The report adds that:

• Mobile activity on social media has grown by 55 percent over the past year.
• It has also accounted for 31 percent of all growth in Internet activity over the same period.
• Facebook alone accounts for 24 percent of all mobile activity online and its primary app is responsible for 18 percent.

The report should give you a whole new perspective on the importance of social media marketing for your business, especially on sites like Facebook.

Mobile Photo via Shutterstock, comScore