Mobile and tablet web traffic shares on the rise in #highered [REPORT]

April 4th, 2013 Karine Joly No Comments

The State of the Mobile & Responsive Web in Higher Ed Survey

I’ve finally analyzed the results of the 2013 State of Web and Responsive Web in Higher Ed Survey.

The 3rd edition of this yearly survey was completed from January 8, 2013 to February 15, 2013 by 174 professionals working mainly in the marketing, communication (43%) and web offices (40%) at universities and colleges. The survey sample of institutions is fairly representative of the Carnegie Classification breakdown.

But, the participation was 30% lower than a year ago.

I wonder if the interest of professionals for this kind of benchmarking surveys has decreased because mobile adoption has been achieved in the majority of insittutions or if this can be explained by the intensified fight for attention on the web.

The full survey report will be published next Wednesday, but I’ll share until then a few interesting insights in a series of short blog posts to increase the reach of these findings in our very noisy and busy online world.

Mobile and tablet traffic shares more than doubled in 2012

Surveyed participants were asked to share their data of mobile and tablet web traffic for the full year of 2011 and 2012, data expressed as a percentage of total web traffic as reported by both mobile and tablet traffic segments in Google Analytics.

Data was submitted by 148 institutions for this optional section of the survey, a section introduced this year.

  • The average reported share of traffic via mobile phones on institutional websites doubled in a year from 4.6% in 2011 to 9.3% in 2012.
  • The average reported share of traffic via tablets on college websites went from 0.5% in 2011 to 3% in 2012.
  • 71% of the surveyed institutions reported mobile traffic shares ranging from 6% to 11%

Mobile traffic share on college websites

I had many exchanges with professionals working in universities and colleges about the evolution of both data points since the beginning of the year. And, in all the cases, the 2013 monthly data has confirmed the steady rise of traffic from mobile and tablet devices on higher ed websites.

Want to benchmark your data?

You will need to have access to your Google Analytics account to be able to retrieve this data using the default segments for mobile and tablet traffic.

In this 2-min screencast, I’m showing you how to do this if you’ve never done it.

Responsive Web Design Course4-week online course: Mobile & Responsive Web Design for Higher Ed
(asynchronous with weekly lessons and assignments)
ONLY 10 seats per session

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