Do you ever find yourself stuck and wondering what to get that hard-to-buy-for friend or family member?

You’re not alone. Now where do you turn?

More and more people are turning to their smartphones, especially when the information they’re seeking is timely and location-sensitive — just like shopping for last-minute gifts for the holiday season.

Google knows this and, digging into its vast repository of data, has actually made a prediction about how many folks will use their mobile devices to search for last-minute gifts this coming holiday season.

Their prediction? 44%.

That means more than 4 of every 10 shoppers searching for last-minute gifts will be using a mobile device.

But wait, there’s more!

Google also predicts:

• 15% of total “Black Friday” searches will be from mobile devices
• 65% of high end device users report that they have used their device to find a business, and then made a purchase at that business in person
• greater than 33% of both smartphone users and tablet users plan to start their shopping before Thanksgiving

Now what does your website look like on a mobile device?

If you’re not happy or you don’t know, click here — let’s talk and solve the problem.

Mobile traffic is only going to keep growing and we still have a short window before the 2011 holiday shopping season. The time is now!

The Nexus S is especially easy to segment right now, since it’s the only Android 2.3 phone out there on the market. Here’s the growth in Nexus S activity we’re seeing on our network:

Looks like people had a lot of fun with their phones on Christmas day!  There’s a little lull afterwards (too many turkey dinners?) and then we see steady traffic growth into January.

So where do these lucky people live?  If you thought “Mountainview”, you’re not too far off.

Nexus S traffic comparison within top 7 cities

These top 7 cities make up about 25% of global Nexus S activity on the Mobify network. Looks like Londoners are actively jumping onboard the Android bandwagon, neck-to-neck with Angelinos. Of course, if we add up San Francisco, Alameda and Mountain View, we account for 32% of traffic from the top 7, about one and a half times either LA or London. After those three, Chicago shows it’s colors next as a tech hub.

Here’s a table of the top 15 cities:

Do you think this data tells us anything about the distribution of Android’s biggest fans?

We’ve heard a lot of announcements from various mobile data sources concerning the relative traffic from different mobile device operating systems. Here’s what we’re seeing on our network.

Mobify Network Americas OS Share

Mobify Network Europe OS Share

The graphs above show relative OS share in pageview requests for the Americas and for Europe. In both cases, the four operating systems shown in the graphs account for more than 90% of all page views. The iOS operating system (iPhone and iPod) remains the dominant OS across the Mobify network accounting for half or more of all page requests. Otherwise browser share is relatively steady. There is a small contraction in BlackBerry pageviews in North America, and slow growth in Android pageviews in both Europe and North America. Although other variations are noticeable, they aren’t large enough to draw any conclusions.

Mobile Web Visitor Behaviour by Device Number of clicks, pageviews and duration of stay are interdependent with the type of device the user is on and, of course, the website. We look at these and some other cool metrics in our report.

Android Mobile Web Use Up 400% in Q2, Outpacing Apple & BlackBerry Android’s rate of traffic growth is staggering. As the overall market continues to grow, both web and app use are continuing to climb. Traffic stats courtesy of UK mobile analytics firm Bango.

Mobile Web traffic grows, not slows, during summer What only seems logical (people don’t spend as much time at home and, therefore, have to be surfing the web on their mobile devices) would seem common sense if only the numbers didn’t reflect a much larger curve: one where there is exponential growth in mobile website visitors. People are browsing the web more everyday!

Smartphones Propel Mobile Net Use. Stats confirm what everyone’s thinking. A good portion of us can’t go a day without browsing the mobile web. eMarketer thinks that rougly 28 percent of the U.S. population accesses the web on their phone everyday. Metrics by AdWeek.

Have a great weekend and see you all next week!

There’s been a lot of buzz about the growth of Android web traffic, but to date we haven’t seen a lot of discussion about the different browsing behaviours of mobile web visitors with these handsets.  In this first post we’ll start the process of exploring how the type of mobile handset used affects mobile web behaviour.

We’ve selected some sites to show relative browsing behaviours on five sites off our network.  The sites have been randomly selected, however each of them receive a minimum of one million mobile page views per month.  In each of the graphs below, we’ve sorted by the number of page views per visit of the mobile operating system.  To the right we also show the breakdown of the operating system as a percentage of site traffic.  Note — we have filtered out all other browsers than the ones listed above so this percentage is relative only between the browsers shown.

Site A - Technology blog

Site B - Technology Blog

Site C - Technology Blog

Site D - Celeb news

Site E - Celeb news

Sites A, B and C are blogs with a technology appeal.  Sites D and E focus on celebrities and celebrity news. We can clearly see the impact of site content on the types of devices used to view content.  The technology sites are dominated by iPhone and Android, with Blackberry accounting for an average of only about 5% of traffic.  BlackBerry is a big player on the celeb sites though, coming in around 30% of total visits, slightly higher than Android.  The celeb sites also feature the lowest percentage of iPhone users, although iPhone users remain the most common type of web visitor.

More interesting is what behaviours are preserved even though the audiences are quite different. Android handset owners tend to dominate page views, averaging about 1.25 page views for every page viewed by an iPhone visitor across these sites. Almost across the board, iPhone users are the least likely to stick around. We’re still slicing and dicing data to see if we can find an answer as to why, but it’s definitely a pattern we see, and across a diverse number of sites.

Takeaways

Designing a great mobile site requires may require making some tradeoffs for your audience.  For sites with less technology oriented visitors, there is still a strong payoff in spending the time to optimize the site for non-touch devices that may have limited support for javascript and CSS.  This landscape is clearly changing, with RIM’s latest BlackBerry Torch offering an powerful browser that stacks up well against other smartphones on the market, but it will take at least a year for these devices to significantly displace existing devices.

Furthermore, despite AdMob’s announcement that Android is king for mobile web traffic, on our network we’re still seeing iPhone as the dominant player on the mobile web, though Android has posted solid gains in the past 6 months.  If Android usage continues to grow as a percentage of mobile web (and we expect it will!) and Android visitors continue to show such strong site loyalty, they may be the most attractive visitors for mobile web advertising spending in the months ahead.

21% of American wireless subscribers have a smartphone at Q4 2009, up from 19% in the previous quarter and significantly higher than the 14% at the end of 2008

With smartphone use on the rise, we expect mobile browsing traffic numbers to grow as well. While native applications are experiencing high download rates, mobile web is picking up steam across many fronts, notably m-commerce.

Past 30 Day App Downloaders

Facebook App leads the popularity charts across all platforms except Android where it got overtaken by Google Maps.

Past 30 Day App Downloaders

We’re happy to announce that Mobify has integrated these new Google Analytics features.  Adding Google analytics for mobile will take about 10 minutes if you don’t yet have a Google Analytics account, or about 5 if you do.  To use Google Analytics for mobile, add a new profile for your mobile domain in Google Analytics (you’ll have to sign up for free if you haven’t already).  If you want your mobile page views to be distinct from your desktop hits it’s important that you select ‘Add a Profile for a new domain’.  Enter your mobile domain name into the form (you’ve created and added a DNS cname for your Mobify mobile view, right?).

For the last step, go to Mobify and select your site from the Dashboard.  After you’ve launched your site, you’ll see an option like this one:

On the services screen, enter the Mobile analytics id provided to you by Google.  Don’t forget to change the start of the analytics id, UA-, to mobile, MO-.

After you’ve entered your mobile analytics key, it can take Google Analytics 12-24 hours to detect the new traffic.