Global leader in measuring digital business analytics, ComScore, recently released data on smartphone and tablet usage in the US. The report titled Digital Omnivores: How Tablets, Smartphones and Connected Devices are Changing U.S. Digital Media Consumption Habits, translates that though Android has a larger share than Apple, the latter drives more traffic.
Mark Donovan, senior vice president of mobile comScore commented on the findings, “The popularization of smartphones and the introduction of tablets and other web-enabled devices – collectively termed ‘connected devices,’ have contributed to an explosion in digital media consumption. As these devices gain adoption, we have also seen the rise of the ‘digital omnivores’, consumers who access content through several touchpoints during the course of their daily digital lives. In order to meet the needs of these consumers, advertisers and publishers must learn to navigate this new landscape so they develop cross-platform strategies to effectively engage their audiences.”
The key findings of the report were:
Android has a larger share than Apple But Apple drives more traffic:
The OS market share in the US for August 2011 shows that Android leads with 43.7% as against 27.3% for Apple smartphones. However, when we consider the traffic, we see that Apple’s iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad) is responsible for almost 59% of non-PC traffic versus 32% for Android.
Over 100 Million Mobile Media Users Served:
More than a 100 million, 116 million to be precise, users in the US use the mobile media i.e, apps, data and mobile Internet. These figures indicate that the mobile Internet (browser and apps) is now more than half the size of the PC Internet, in less than 5 years.
Most sought after on mobile Internet are Email and Weather:
While 81 million mobile users accessed the email, 72.7 million visitors sought information on the weather. The social networking sites and blogs saw a traffic of 72.2 million visitors. Games were popular with 66.7 million users while 61.5 million users used Search and 53.9 million users accessed maps.
Mobile has a small share of the overall Internet traffic:
Inspite of predictions from several analysts’ firms that there will be more Internet traffic from mobile devices in the coming few years as compared to PCs, as of now mobile contributes to just below 7 percent of all digital traffic.
Tablets have a higher conversion rate than Smartphones:
Comscore has found that nearly half of the tablet owners have made or completed a purchase on their tablet. The report quotes, “Tablet owners exhibited significant use of their devices throughout the entire online shopping process – from doing the initial planning, conducting product and store research, making price comparisons, to finally transacting. In the past month, more than half of the tablet owners looked up product or price information for a specific store (56 percent) and read customer ratings and reviews while on a tablet ( 54%).
The other findings of the survey were:
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In the US, tablet users display the characteristics of early technology adopters : Young males in upper income brackets.
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Nearly 3 out of 5 tablet owners consume news on their tablets.
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Tablets facilitate real-time social networking.
You can read the full report at http://www.comScore.com/DigitalOmnivores