Mobile Devices Now Driving 56 Percent Of Traffic To Top Sites — Report

According to SimilarWeb’s State of Mobile Web US 2015 report, roughly 56 percent of consumer traffic to the leading US websites is now from mobile devices. Mobile traffic in Q4 was roughly 49 percent, on average, for these top sites.

The report is based on the company’s analysis of the top 10,000 US websites in 24 categories. It does not include app usage. The following are the top 10 mobile traffic site categories, with the top five are receiving at least 60 percent of their traffic from mobile devices.

1. Beauty and Fitness
2. Home and Garden
3. Health
4. Pets and Animals
5. People and Society
6. Shopping
7. Gambling
8. Auto
9. Recreation and Hobbies
10. Sports

While mobile drove more traffic, engagement remains higher on desktop overall, with more time on site and more pages per visit, on average. Mobile bounce rates were higher, as well. As mentioned, app usage is not part of this data.

SimilarWeb also observed a interesting discrepancy between some of the top mobile traffic sites and their engagement metrics:

There is a mismatch between the most mobile industries to those that most engage their users. Beauty and Fitness and Home and Garden, which led the list of highest mobile web share, are not performing well in terms of keeping people on their mobile sites.

There’s no explanation for the traffic-engagement imbalance offered in the report, which goes on to look at mobile web traffic across a number of specific verticals including shopping, finance, telecommunications and jobs. As one example, the following chart illustrates how mobile-centric Amazon has become and how dominant it is versus its competitors.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Greg Sterling

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land, a member of the programming team for SMX events and the VP, Market Insights at Uberall.