It’s no shocker that more people are accessing the web today via mobile devices than ever before. A July 2010 study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 38% of U.S. users had logged into the Internet from their cellphones in May, compared to 255 who said they’d done so about a year earlier.
But that figure doesn’t contain any guarantees about what those mobilizing multitudes find when they get to the web on their phones. All too often, a website that works perfectly well on a 17-inch monitor crumbles to microscopic links and undelivered graphics when translated to the small third screen.
Mike Brown, vice president of optimization for the Vegas.com travel booking site, says his company aimed for pretty bare-bones functionality when it produced its first mobile version of the site two years ago. That meant transitioning only some of the main site’s content to the WAP format: the in-town attractions and entertainment bookings, for example, but not the travel and lodging offers that make up a large portion of the main site.
“Our original guess was that the site would be most useful to people who were already in town and using their devices to buy additional stuff, such as activities,” he says.
But Brown kept any eye on traffic to the mobile version of Vegas.com, and by Q1 2010 realized he was seeing both a large increase in overall visits and a jump in access by devices with JavaScript capabilities — a basic prerequisite for conducting transactions. And he judged the time was right for a full-featured mobile site that incorporated more offerings and let users buy and book right from their phones.
“We got it wrong,” he says. “They were using the device because it’s their preferred channel, not because they’re sitting in the Bellagio wondering what to do that night. We weren’t merchandising on the mobile site the things they wanted to buy; we needed to offer all our products.”
A round of tests using the A/B platform from SiteSpect convinced Brown that his company could benefit substantially from offering mobile users an experience tailored for their devices. For example, offering wireless users an optimized site allowed Vegas.com to cut their bounce rate by 22%, increase page views by 16%, and achieve a 14% increase in hotel searches via cellphone. Conversion rates ultimately rose by a double-digit percentage.
What’s more, SiteSpect was able to host the Vegas.com content on its servers and deliver that content as mobile-ready when it detected users accessing it via cellphone. That essentially saved Brown and company the trouble of having to build a totally distinct mobile site.
“For an online site like us, mobile isn’t just a little sideshow anymore,” Brown says. “It needs to be part of our core, internally developed functionality.”
Chances are still good that Vegas.com will develop an app, Brown says. But having a flexible structure that allows the site to put its content up directly onto the mobile web is useful and probably a more cost-efficient use of resources.
“To most people in the travel and hospitality space, having an iPhone app is the shiny new thing,” he says. “But I’d rather develop an infrastructure that can take advantage of mobile growth wherever it happens, and not put all our eggs in a walled garden like the iTunes Store.”
Got a mobile marketing tip to share? Contact Brian Quinton at [email protected]
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