It’s no exaggeration to say that mobile shopping has transformed the retail landscape. A quick look at the latest Google Shopping stats reveals mobile’s massive impact. Last year, shopping journeys that began on desktop and ended with a mobile conversion grew 259%, according to the 2018 Google Shopping Benchmarks Report. That’s a complete reversal of the traditional thinking that consumers research products on mobile and ultimately purchase on desktop.
And as mobile shopping continues to rise on the channel, so too do average order values, which grew 6% in 2017. This suggests that consumers not only use mobile for purchases of convenience, but also for multi-product or big ticket buys.
Retailers looking to capitalize on this growth, and remain competitive, must optimize their mobile experiences. In the video above, I explain how retailers can optimize Google Shopping campaign structure and construct seamless, cross-device shopping experiences.
For more insights on the rise of mobile shopping and other industry trends, be sure to check out Sidecar’s 2018 Google Shopping Benchmarks Report. The report distills key takeaways from 300-plus retailers’ campaigns and provides winning tactics for navigating an evolving channel.
Transcript
Steve Costanza: Phones are just a part of our lives now. They are replacing desktops and laptops. And there’s actually a coming generation of people who have only ever used phones—and they’ve never used laptops—to make a purchase in their lives. What we’re seeing now is just a growing comfort level with making that final purchase decision on a mobile device.
We saw a pretty significant uptick in 2017 over the previous year of average order value on mobile purchases. A lot of that has to do with the page speed. With the adoption of 4G networks, there’s Wi-Fi everywhere. Cell phones are becoming faster. There’s a lot of touch points in the consumer journey, so it’s not linear anymore. It’s not, “I’m researching on mobile. I’m gonna go buy on desktop now.” People are initiating searches on both devices.
There are two major parts of optimizing for mobile traffic. The first part is improving your mobile site experience, creating landing pages that have rich content, recommended products, easy-to-use navigation that you can get back to a category page, so you’re not clicking on a product, bouncing right back to the search, decreasing page load times. Google claims that 53% of people will leave a page if it doesn’t load within 5 seconds.
The second approach is directly within your shopping campaigns—creating a mobile-specific campaign. If you have enough data to support that it’s definitely the way to go. You can set individual bids for every product based on just mobile performance. You can also include cross-device and assisted conversions in your normal KPIs so you’re getting a fuller picture of what mobile is contributing to your performance. And then, lastly, using remarketing lists to track users who have visited your site across both device types.
