Earlier this morning Affiliate Window, an affiliate network that prides itself in tracking “over 90% of mobile activity” [more here] posted some truly impressive data on their Facebook page: in the month of July 2013 they registered 13,000 affiliate-referred mobile sales each day. This means over 400,000 mobile sales driven by affiliates in one ordinary month.
Coincidentally, I was reading this on my mobile (riding under Neva River in St Petersburg, Russia), and having glanced over the referenced blog post, I quickly figured out that 55.38% of their affiliate-driven “mobile” sales, actually, came from iPads (for some time I’ve been saying that tablets must be in a category of their own instead of being bundled up with the rest of “mobile” devices). But I also reached out to Affiliate Window to clarify the exact distributions between tablets and phones. They responded quickly clarifying that
- Tablet traffic (42.47%) yields the majority of “mobile” sales (60.37%)
- While handset visitors (57.53%) are in the minority when it comes to the actual sales numbers (39.63%)
I would be lying if I said these results fully matched my expectations. On the one hand, yes, it was natural to expect that tablet users would be in the majority of shoppers. On the other hand though, I, personally (a) expected the total percentage of tablet visitors to be much higher than some 42.5%, and (b) did not expect that as many as nearly 40% of phone users actually use their “handsets” to shop.
Are you tracking mobile affiliate-referred sales yet?
Pingback: Marketing Day: August 7, 2013
Mobile is definitely a source of traffic that can no longer be ignored. Many of my squeeze pages utilize videos that don’t do well on smart phones. My priority now is to implement responsive design on all my sites so that I’m not throwing away money on traffic that can’t see my message.