Mobile conversions from affiliates hit a wall in 2012

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Posted 17 September 2012 12:31pm by David Moth with 0 comments

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New data from Affiliate Window shows that mobile conversion rates have plateaued this year, hovering around the 3% mark since January.

In 2011 mobile conversions increased from around 1.9% in January to more than 3.5% in December, but 2012 has seen a levelling out.

As m-commerce sites are becoming more common, these statistics highlight the difficulty brands face with increasing transactions on mobile.

We recently reviewed the top 20 UK retailers' mobile checkouts and found that in general the sites were user-friendly. But clearly consumers still prefer to make a purchase using a desktop or tablet rather than their mobile.

The AW stats show that August actually saw a slight drop in mobile conversions to 2.84% from 3.14% in July.

Looking at conversion rates by device, Blackberry achieved the highest conversion rate in August at 4.42% (although is it from a significantly smaller proportion of traffic) followed by desktop and then iPad.

Android, iPhone and 'Other' all experienced a slight drop in conversion rates and are converting at 1.8% to 1.9%.

Sales

AW's data shows that the percentage of sales through mobile devices dropped in August to 9.35% from a high of 9.42% in July.

Despite this minor decrease the share of sales through mobile devices has shown steady growth during 2012 and have more than quadrupled since January 2011.

Looking at the breakdown by device, Android has maintained its share of sales over the past four weeks, but sales are not growing in line with the growth in traffic that these devices are experiencing. 

This is indicative of a drop off in the conversion rate through Android devices.

Sales through iPhone are almost double that of Android devices for each of the four weeks, but iPad is still the strongest performer by far with around 59% of sales.

Traffic

As is to be expected, the share of traffic coming through AW from mobile devices increased again in August to 13.35%, or 8% if tablet traffic is stripped out.

AW says the sudden drop off in July is due to a large spike in desktop traffic rather than a decline in mobile visits.

Looking at traffic by device, iPad drives the most traffic followed by iPhone. Android's share of traffic is still someway behind iPhone but it has been steadily increasing during 2012.