Affiliate Window’s mobile data is drawn from over 3.5 million network transactions each month across 2,100 advertisers spanning the retail, travel and telecoms sectors. Clients we work with include John Lewis, Marks & Spencer, British Telecom and lastminute.com.
Working with around half the top 100 retail brands in the UK as well as over 1,000 SMEs allows us to build a comprehensive picture of the mobile landscape.
Q2 mobile traffic grows from strength to strength
Over one of the typically quieter periods across the network and outside of the traditional sale peaks, we have witnessed strong growth in mobile traffic, with this quarter seeing nearly 60% of total traffic from mobile devices, with both tablets and smartphones playing a key role.
Over the quarter smartphones averaged 25.8% of total traffic, whilst tablets accounted for 32.8% of traffic. We saw peak traffic for tablets on June 5, at 42.5%, whereas smartphones peaked earlier in the quarter on April 2 with 30.9% of total traffic.
Although mobile traffic has been growing consistently across the network over the past few years, this latest spike has been impacted by increased influence led marketing activity, showcasing the role and extent to which publishers can play in driving and influencing affiliate transactions. Social channels in particular serve as a platform for this influence activity, enabling publishers to reach a wider diversity of followers and subscribers.
This trend, although not yet seen network wide, is having an increasing impact on the portfolio of publishers generating traffic and sales across the retail sectors, and will be a trend to watch in the months to come. It’s also key for advertisers to ensure that publishers are rewarded fairly, especially where the influencing device may be different to the device converted on. As we’ve explored the insights behind cross device customer journeys further this year, this is a trend that has becoming increasingly apparent.
Smartphones are the mobile device of choice for conversion
The Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend last November was the first point where we readily saw smartphone transactions exceed the percentage of total sales over tablets, and this is a trend that has continued to grow since.
Over the course of Q2 2016, we have seen 20.7% of total transactions from smartphone devices, whilst tablets accounted for 17.7% for the same period. For smartphones this is a 1.3% increase from the previous quarter, whilst tablets actually dipped by 1.6% in total transaction share.
Focusing on conversion for these device types, smartphone conversion remains steady at 3.4% in Q2. Tablet conversion on the other hand has dropped considerably, down to 2.3% from 3.9% in Q1 2016.
Drilling down to an individual device level, we can see that iPhone and Android phones convert around the same amount with 3.5% and 3.3% seen respectively in conversion rates for this quarter. Average order value (AOV) however is a different story, and we have continued to see iPhone devices drive a higher AOV than Androids with £57 in Q2 2016 for iPhones versus £51 for Android Phones. This gap has increased marginally since Q1 2016.
As we move into Q3 and into busier periods across the network for both traffic and transactions’ volume, we can expect smartphones to continue to set the pace for mobile performance, as the transacting mobile device of choice. It will however be interesting to monitor the growth of influencer traffic across the network, especially towards sales peaks where discounting is typically more prevalent.
