How long do mobile visitors stay on your site versus desktop visitors?

[MichaelCorfman]

Many webmasters have focused on making their sites mobile friendly given that Google announced some time ago that April 21st (yesterday) was an important date in their plans to begin favoring mobile friendly pages in mobile search results.

Certainly the team at Casino City has worked on a number of our sites to make them mobile friendly. But independently of how this effects search rankings, it is pretty clear that mobile friendly sites are appreciated by site visitors using mobile devices. If you are changing your sites, it can be interesting to measure the impact.

Let me give an example. We have a site, www.casinocitytimes.com, that holds a large number of news and gaming strategy articles, and we just recently converted this site to be responsive and friendly to mobile devices. To measure the impact, I looked at data provided by Google analytics. I selected Audience, and then Mobile, and then Overview. This presents a page that shows a variety of data for site visitors, separating desktop, mobile, and tablet devices. One of the data points provided is average session duration. This is what that data looked like for this site for the first three months of 2015, before we made any changes to make the site mobile friendly:

Desktop - average session duration of 1:37 (97 seconds)
Mobile - average session duration of 0:55 (55 seconds)
Tablet - average session duration of 1:59 (119 seconds)
Total - average session duration of 1:24 (84 seconds)

Then, after a first pass at converting the site to be mobile responsive, the data looked like this (last four days of data):

Desktop - average session duration of 1:35 (95 seconds)
Mobile - average session duration of 1:23 (83 seconds)
Tablet - average session duration of 2:18 (138 seconds)
Total - average session duration of 1:36 (96 seconds)

So, looking at mobile visitors, you can see the average session duration went from 55 seconds to 83 seconds - a very significant increase of over 50%. Tablet session duration also improved from 119 to 138 seconds, which is a smaller, but still significant increase of over 15%. So I'm very happy with these results independently of any improvements in the number of mobile visitors due to Google algorithm changes.

But the real focus of this poll is how long mobile visitors stay on your site versus desktop visitors. In this example, currently mobile visitors spend 83 seconds on the site versus 95 seconds for desktop visitors. So mobile sessions now last 87.4% (83/95) as long as desktop sessions. Much better than the previous 56.7% (55/97).

Besides sharing current ratios of session lengths for mobile versus desktop traffic on you site, share the impact you've seen if you have changed your site to be mobile more mobile friendly.

Michael

[wonderpunter]

Mobile 2.28
Desktop 2.34
Tablet 1.32

Tablet is surprisingly low.. it also only accounts for 5% of my traffic,

If i filter by country then there is a massive increase to the USA time spent, canada aussie almost a minute extra.. and the Spanish speaking countries typically 5-6 minutes... A lot of the insignificant countries really lower avg session.. Taiwan, Japan, khazakistan etc

And to add to that, Outbound affiliate clicks Mobile is around 60%, desktop 38% with tablet a measly 2%...

[xecutable]

A lot more which doesn't really mean much. When you are on a desktop machine, it's very likely you are not doing anything else and you are concentrated on the material you are looking at, hence you can go through a small article pretty quick.

A mobile user, checking something out, while talking to a friend or whatever may get distracted with hundred other things. And that's just once scenario. That's what my stats show and that's why my mobile users have 150%-300% more time on site.

I also find it a lot easier to read on a big monitor, rather than scrolling a 1200 word article on a phone. I think in order to truly compare mobile vs desktop users, ud have to put them in the same environment, reading the exact same page in the exact same time, otherwise too many things affect the end results.

[sweetbet]

The stats for my main site are:

1. desktop (77.80%) 2:56
2. mobile (13.33%) 2:34
3. tablet (8.87%) 6:12

[TheGooner]

I'll share because Sweetbet shared


1. mobile (50.53%) -- 4.09 pages 04:05
2. desktop (43.12%) - 4.46 pages 03:49
3. tablet (6.35%) ----- 4.55 pages 04:02

I don't see anything significant there - maybe a slight page dropoff for mobile.

[golfbettingsystem]

Year to date:

1. mobile 44.27%, 2.89 pages, 2:47 average duration
2. desktop 40.29%, 3.78 pages, 4:17 average duration
3. tablet 15.43%, 3.71 pages, 4:22 average duration

Bigger proportion of tablet visitors for us than some of the other figures it would seem.

[wettFORM.AT]

I have never checked these stats so far but it´s very interesting. I can see that our mobile visitors stay much longer on the site than the desktop visitors. Very good learning. Thank´s for bringing this to my attention.