Bloggers Start Paying Attention to Your Mobile Users

We are influencers and brand affiliates.  This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.

How often do you check your Google Analytics for your blog to see what percentage of your users come from a mobile browser, compared to standard desktop browser?  Have you started putting in a mobile theme yet or started on a plan to appeal to your mobile readers/customers?

You have even more limited real estate on a mobile browser screen, so it is imperative that your mobile theme be optimized for the mobile experience.  In this case you may use a plugin like WP Touch Pro which I do and it does a fantastic job, but it doesn’t display my sidebars or my AdSense/BSA ads so this means thousands of visits per month aren’t seeing those ads.

How to Check Your Mobile Visitors

Mosey on over to Google Analytics where you can keep track of the types of browsers and user-agents that connect to your website.  Note that each mobile device is a user-agent type.

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I don’t check this statistic as often as I should, so I was surprised to find thousands of visitors were reaching my site monthly.

How many thousands?

Well, I checked last month and saw that 10% of my site traffic comes from mobile browsers now.

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Also, Mobile visitors have a lower bounce rate and tend to visit more than one page compared to desktop browsers.

What this means is 4,787 visits to my site, this is more than 3 of my smaller personal blogs TOTAL traffic visit dragonblogger.com from a mobile browser.

Mobile Agent Types

In addition to having mobile cell phones visiting to my type, you have to know what types of user-agents are visiting so you know that your mobile theme is compatible and rendering properly for those agent types.  A quick click on the “Devices” tab in Google Analytics will show you the top user-agents that are visiting your site.

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Is it no surprise that iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch are in the top 4 (not set) means the user-agent isn’t coming across somehow or for some reason.  You can also see that Kindle Fire is the #6 most popular mobile agent-type to visit my blog which isn’t surprising based on some key articles focused around the Kindle Fire in previous months.

Now, if you use a mobile theme like WP Touch Pro you will want to find the user-agent’s for these phone types and make sure they are added in the custom agents setting.  You can get a very comprehensible list of user agents from this site: http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html

How to Cater to Mobile Users

When thinking about mobile visitors you want to pay attention to this:  If your user can only see a 4″ section of your website, what is the most important thing you want to show them?  Of course this is content, you want to have titles and articles visible and able to read right away.  Inside the articles you will want to minimize giant media images, and instead focus more on text links and perhaps smaller ads.  I think in a mobile browser the 125×125 and 250×250 are the largest size you really want to use in posts for banners.  Though you may be able to get away with a 468×60 banner in there.

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WP Touch Pro does a fair job of adding a Google AdSense banner at the top of articles which can catch some passive clicks and earnings, but overall it’s low. It is better if you can market your own product and showcase it at the top or bottom of your post to attract a reader to become a customer.

I still think that leveraging articles around reviews, pitches and link based sales are more effective for a mobile device when the reader is reading.  Make sure your content captures interest and the reader wants to convert to becoming a customer if you are marketing a product or service.

Mobile Requires Speed Speed Speed

Your website cannot afford to have 15 second load times on a mobile device, this would cripple anyone from visiting your site and they will move on.  Your website needs to be zippy and not have any of the major overhead issues that a normal fancy themed and image laden site may have.  You need to focus on what to present and make it as easy to access and see as possible.

WP Touch Pro is the WordPress plugin I have chosen to use, and the Pro version comes with a great iPad theme which I really love.  When I do get some more budget for design for the site though, I do intend to have a custom theme designed, one that is more functional and when my site reaches 10k mobile visitors per month, I am going to need one that can display BuySellAds slots on it in the posts at least so those visits can be properly represented on BuySellAds.  I was wondering why BuySellAds always showed a lower range of impressions than my Analytics and I realized it is because 10% of my site traffic (mobile devices) doesn’t display the BSA banner hence the ads aren’t getting all of the impressions they could get.

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-Dragon Blogger

We are influencers and brand affiliates.  This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.

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