By Chris Trayhorn

 

Affiliate Window just released a white paper that examines the growth in mobile commerce on their network, with particular focus on the UK. The UK has always been something of a bellwether for the mobile sector: the common GSM phone standard across Europe has long allowed mobile technologies to be hothoused there faster than in the USA, while the country is close enough in culture to the USA to be useful as a predictor. So this report provides useful insight into where we are heading.

Some key points:
– Smartphone and tablet penetration is approaching 60%.
– Mobile represents 11% of search spend now – predicted to be 15-20% by year-end (it’s 8% in the USA)
– 12% of website visits come from mobile devices.
– Traffic from mobile devices predicted to exceed desktop by end of 2013.

Affiliafe Window Mobile Chart

The big takeaway is that mobile PPC is cheaper and that it converts almost as well as desktop traffic so long as the landing page is optimized for mobile. iPhones and iPads convert best, with Android and blackBerry devices trailing a long way behind.

From the report:
55% of all our mobile sales have been generated through the iPad. The dominant handset is the iPhone with 29% of all mobile sales. Android devices are still a long way off delivering the volumes that we see through the iPhone but we expect to see this gap close over the coming months with Android really driving smartphone adoption.

The white paper also discusses the fact that many potential mobile sales are still being lost due to poor optimization of the mobile experience and lack tracking to the mobile channel – attribution to mobile is still an issue. Once we see many more publishers educated to optimize and track mobile effectively then we will see that mobile is the place that merchants and networks should be placing their efforts right now.

The entire Affiliate Window white paper is available for download.