What were you doing on Saturday April 9^th 2011? Yes, last Saturday. “I was using my internet-enabled mobile device to browse the internet, Paul,” you say? Well I didn’t expect that to be the first answer I got, admittedly, but it does help to conveniently underline the message of this post, so I thank you. Mobile internet traffic is increasing rapidly, particularly in the UK. On top of that, there are a series of external factors that are influencing the volumes on any given day. Looking at our client’s analytics data, as I do, I have been seeing several new patterns and rules emerging for marketers to deal with.

Mobile users by the tens of thousands. Photo by Carlhiett.co.uk

Mobile traffic behaves differently to desktop traffic. The details of that are perhaps left to another post but take a look at your own web traffic and you’ll probably see shorter visits, fewer pageviews and if your site is well designed for mobile, possibly higher conversion rates. But I only bring that up to emphasise the fact that we all need to adapt our sites and marketing quickly to the mobile visitor.

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For years we at Mediarun have been aware of the relationship between an increase in non-brand organic search visits and a direct correlation increase in brand search visits. Using standard tools such as Google Analytics this relationship in terms of traffic is relatively easy to establish and to get a handle on. Often convincing clients of this relationship has proved challenging but on the whole most informed client side marketers are happy to take this on board.

Yes, another not-too-subtle visual pun. It was late on a Thursday, okay.

Attributing a value on conversions however has traditionally proved a lot trickier. Writing on Econsultancy last week Paul Cook founder of Tag Man highlights some interesting points. The thesis of the article was that organic SEO and social media channels are being chronically undervalued. Based on ‘attributed conversions’  he identified that SEO should be credited with 14 times more value in terms of conversions and that social media is being undervalued by eight times.

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