Still Wondering if You Need a Mobile Site? Check Out This Data

Google recently conducted a survey of consumers that asked about their use of mobile websites. Here’s some key results:

• 67% of mobile users say that when they visit a mobile-friendly site, they’re more likely to buy a site’s product or service.
• 52% of users said that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company.
• 48% said that if a site didn’t work well on their smartphones, it made them feel like the company didn’t care about their business.

There’s nothing surprising here: people browsing the web on their phones are turned off when a site behaves poorly. Yet we still hear from site owners all the time who question the value of investing in mobile sites.

How many people are browsing the web using smartphones?

According to a April 2012 study by Pew Internet, more than half of American cell-phone owners (53%, representing 46% of all U.S. adults) now own a smartphone, and 90% of these smartphone owners use their phone to go online. Almost one-third of them (31%) say that they mostly go online using their cell phone.

The prolific Luke Wrobleski quotes a variety of statistics that show this trend is even more pronounced is some other countries. In the UK, 42% of adults who own a smartphone say this device is the most important one for accessing the Internet. In Africa, more than half of Internet users are exclusively on mobile.