In 2014, a mobile strategy can no longer be an afterthought. With the percentage of visits from mobile traffic surging–more than 25% of visits now come from a smartphone or tablet–a mobile plan is an absolute necessity. Continuing to serve the “desktop” version of your site to mobile visitors delivers a bad user experience; navigation is extremely difficult, and content is generally hard to consume.
To address this problem, there are three basic options:
- Build a mobile app;
- Build a mobile or responsive site; or
- Build both an app and mobile site.
Many site owners are anxious to build out an app to show that they’re on the cutting edge and have the capability to put out cool new products. But a mobile site, while much less glamorous in many ways, may deliver much better value to many publishers considering an investment in their mobile strategy.
Mobile App vs. Mobile Site
If your resources allow for it, the best solution is to create both a mobile app (or, more likely, multiple mobile apps) and a mobile-friendly website. In general, create your mobile app for your power users–the most engaged and loyal segment of your user base. A mobile site should basically mirror your “desktop site” and serve as the top of a funnel for introducing new visitors to your property.
Benefits of Mobile Site
In 2014, a mobile site is pretty much a requirement if you’re running any type of serious online business. Non-responsive sites render poorly on mobile devices, making them difficult to navigate on a phone or tablet. As more and more sites become responsive (i.e., optimized for mobile browsing), user patience with non-optimized sites grows thinner and thinner.
There are several places where a mobile site has the advantage over a mobile app:
Sharable. It is much easier to share content from a mobile-friendly site than from an app. If the content you want to share through a social media network or email is hosted at a static URL, sharing is as easy as a copy and paste. If it’s hosted within an app, instructions for viewing the desired content involve a download from the app store and navigating through the screens of the app.
Sharing content from most apps is impossible, whereas sharing content from a mobile site is extremely easy.
SEO. As far as a search engine is concerned, a mobile site is generally the same as a traditional website. Search engines can crawl the content of a mobile site, and links to the mobile site pass value on to the entire domain name. Because it’s impossible to link directly to an app screen–as discussed in regards to sharing above–it’s also impossible for others to link to your app or for search engines to crawl the content of your app. That means your app will get traffic from only one source.
As noted below, having a responsive design will also help your site in the search results. Because responsive sites will generally deliver a better user experience, they will surpass non-optimized sites in results conducted on mobile devices.
Traffic Drivers. App stores are crowded–very crowded. There are more than 1 million apps in the Apple app store, with a similar number appearing on the Google platform. More than 1,000 apps are being submitted to the App Store for approval each day, meaning that those numbers will continue to grow. In other words, most apps get lost in the wave of new releases and upgrades, and end up getting fairly little attention. If you’re expecting that you’ll release your app and millions of downloads will follow, you probably need to reassess your plans.
A mobile site, on the other hand, comes with some already established traffic drivers in place. The mobile site gets to leverage the traditional site already in place, meaning that it will receive search and direct traffic from day one. Perhaps more exciting, the addition of a mobile site should help to improve the site’s rankings on mobile searches.
Simplicity. Creating a mobile site is an easier route in many cases. Advertisements can remain consolidated to a single server and/or network. You only have one version to worry about, instead of creating and then maintaining apps that can be sold on the iOS, Android, and perhaps even BlackBerry platforms.
Instant Updates. Changes to a mobile website, such as a new design or a bug fix, can be released immediately. Apps, on the other hand, generally have an approval period for updates that can delay availability by a day or so. From there, the implementation of the update is often delayed by several more days, depending on the frequency with which users install them.
Benefits of Mobile App
A polished and pretty mobile app is a fun toy. If a mobile-friendly site is a reliable Toyota, an app is perhaps a Porsche. It’s not as practical in many ways, but looks great and makes others take notice.
While mobile sites are generally a better investment, there are some instances where mobile apps have the advantage:
New Ad Options. If you sell directly to advertisers, you probably won’t have much difficulty getting someone to sign up for a sponsorship of your mobile app at a premium price. At least for now, mobile app sponsorships are a hot commodity to advertisers–especially if your app has a decent number of downloads.
Mobile apps can be priced at a premium rate by charging a flat weekly or monthly fee in order to have banner ads appear there. Even if the traffic isn’t huge, many advertisers get excited about the idea of doing something different and owning a high impact placement such as a mobile ad. To the right is an example of a banner ad within an iPhone app.
If you aren’t selling directly to advertisers, however, there won’t be much additional revenue available through a mobile app than there would be via a mobile-friendly site.
Branding. As mentioned at the very beginning, many site owners are interested in developing an app for the cachet that comes with it. It’s easy to dismiss as a superficial desire, but there is definitely something to it. In an era where the biggest and best sites have multiple mobile apps available, missing out completely can make you seem a bit behind the times.
A mobile app does also represent a new platform on which your site and brand can be discovered. While the traditional model involves sending traffic from your website to the app store to download your app, that referral path works in reverse as well. App aficionados may discover your site as a result of coming across your app, and become regular visitors to your site.
Freemium Possibilities. It’s easy to spend money from within an app. And people do indeed spend; in-app purchases represent more than three quarters of total app marketplace revenue (and more than 90% in some countries). Because your credit card number is already on file, all that is generally required is a re-entering of the password.
Most sites don’t have a product or service for which in-app purchasing is an option. But if you do have something that can be purchased within an app–either as a one time or recurring spend–there is a major advantage to creating and promoting one.
Offline Functionality. If your mobile app features some sort of tool that can run without an Internet connection, users will be able to fire it up even when they’re offline. The same obviously can’t be said for any tool or functionality housed within a mobile site, which needs connectivity in order to function.
The mobile app for Basecamp, a project management platform, is a great example. Even when offline, users can pull up lists of tasks assigned to them or others if they need additional information or are working on a project:
A mobile site would be worthless for offline users wanting to access their Basecamp account; they’d have to wait until an Internet connection became available.
More Frequent Engagement. Mobile apps are easier to access than mobile websites. The former takes just a touch from the home screen on a device, while the latter requires opening a browser and typing in a URL. Accessing a mobile website takes perhaps ten seconds longer than opening a mobile app. That doesn’t sound like much, but it might as well be an eternity as far as the convenience factor is concerned.
Think about your own personal mobile habits. It’s much more convenient to open up the Bloomberg app on my iPhone than it is to open up Safari and type in Bloomberg.com. Though the content provided on both is similar–finance and investing news–I never go to the mobile site. If there wasn’t a free app, I would probably get that content elsewhere.
To explain this benefit another way, imagine if the Weather.com app disappeared from your phone tomorrow. Most regular users of the app would probably go to the App Store and download AccuWeather (or some other highly rated weather app) as opposed to opening up their mobile browser and navigating to the mobile site.
Though the gap between the two has closed dramatically, the perception is still that apps are much easier to use than mobile sites.
Personalization. It’s generally much easier to personalize an app than it is a mobile website, a big advantage for certain types of products. To continue with the example from above, the Bloomberg app allows users to customize the screens to their particular interests, including entering stock tickers that they’d like to reference regularly.
This advantage of a mobile app has been diminished quite a bit as the technology around mobile sites has improved. Many mobile versions of websites now effectively save user information, allowing for the personalization that has long been available in apps. For example, opening up the mobile version of Weather.com will display the weather in your local area, delivering a personalized and user-friendly experience.
In other words, while it remains slightly easier to personalize an app this advantage is now very slight.
Advanced Features. If your idea for a mobile experience involves any advanced features such as a camera on a mobile device, an app is really the only option available. This isn’t much of a consideration for most sites developing a mobile strategy, but the advantage here is clearly toward an app.
Monetization: Mobile Site vs. Mobile App
In addition to the user experience and audience development considerations mentioned above, you’ll obviously need to think about how well these different strategies monetize. For this discussion, we’ll assume we’re discussing free apps and not pay-to-download products that are an entirely different strategy.
Again, the optimal scenario here is to build both a mobile app and a mobile website; with this route, you’ll have both an app to sell as well as mobile pageviews to monetize. But if you are resource constrained, there are some facts and trends worth considering in your decision:
- As mentioned above, building a mobile-friendly site will almost definitely increase your mobile traffic as search engines “reward” the better user experience. That obviously means more ad impressions to monetize via ads.
- If you’re monetizing primarily via display ads.
- If you’re monetizing through any sort of sales channel, a mobile app enabled for in-app purchases will probably result in higher sales.
- Mobile click rates are high–very high (the graphic below is from AppFlood). Still, effective RPMs are low for mobile ads. This is likely the result of a high number of accidental clicks on mobile devices (where ads take up a significant percentage of the total screen).
- Mobile app sponsorships are more appealing to advertisers, and as such, are more likely to command a premium price. Ads on mobile sites, on the other hand, aren’t nearly as “sexy” of a product and will be generally sold along with “normal” inventory.
- Setting up a mobile site to run ads is very straightforward–in fact, it’s probably done already. For most sites, you’ll be able to leverage the existing networks and ad servers to serve up ads just as you would to desktop devices.
- Setting up ads to run in a mobile app is pretty straightforward, but does require a bit of additional programming.
To summarize, the key points for monetizing mobile traffic via mobile sites and mobile apps is as follows:
- Developing a mobile site will deliver more traffic, which can be monetized immediately and efficiently via existing display ad strategies.
- A mobile app allows for both easy in-app purchases (this is relevant only to certain types of publishers) as well as a premium sponsorship that can be sold to direct advertisers.
- Mobile sites will generally have greater long-term revenue potential, especially as the functionality gap continues to close and mobile Web traffic continues to climb.
For more on monetizing a mobile app, be sure to check out our feature article: 101 Ways to Make Money with Your iPhone, Android, or Mobile App.
Bottom Line
If you have the time and resources to make both an app and a mobile site, that’s probably the best approach. If you’re resource constrained, it probably makes sense to prioritize a mobile-friendly site and worry about an app at a later time. Here’s our suggestion:
- Build a mobile site.
- Figure out if you really need an app.
- If so, build an app.
Of course, the suggestions above are only rules of thumb. Each online property has unique audiences and content strategies that make a universal recommendation tough.
Great article. I’m facing a few of these issues as well..