Mobile continues to grow its share of web visits

However, desktop and mobile have different strengths and both play an important role in the advertising journey

Key points:

• Most website visits are made via mobile, making up 69.7% of traffic during Q4 2023.
• For our higher education clients, an average of 75% of all conversions come from mobile.
• Mobile helps as an awareness and engagement driver, while desktop tends to capture more leads, as people are more likely to fill out the necessary information on a computer.

Mobile makes up an increasingly larger share of web visits, but higher education marketers need to ensure their advertisements run on both mobile and desktop as they each have specific strengths.

Most website visits are made via mobile, making up 69.7% of traffic during Q4 2023, up from 67.1% in Q4 2022, according to research by Contentsquare. For its 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Report, it analyzed more than 43 billion sessions and 200 billion pageviews across 3,590 websites from October 2022 through December 2023.

Mobile’s share of visits accounted for more than 70% in Retail (77%), Consumer Packaged Goods (71.8%) and Telecommunications (71.7%), while it took up a much lower share in Energy, Utilities & Construction (51.7%), Financial Services (50.1%) and Software (30.5%). Mobile’s share grew in each industry apart from Services, where it dropped from 49.5% to 45.7%. For university websites, mobile accounts for 44% of all traffic, data from Fundamental Media shows.

While less than a fifth of desktop traffic (19.3%) was paid traffic, for mobile traffic this figure was almost double (39.6%), Contentsquare found. However, desktop’s conversion rate (4.03% in Q4 2023, down from 4.08% a year earlier) is almost double that of mobile (2.19% in Q4 2023, down from 2.34% in Q4 2023).

For our higher education clients, an average of 75% of all conversions come from mobile. Mobile helps as an awareness and engagement driver, while desktop tends to capture more leads, as people are more likely to fill out the necessary information on a computer.

These figures indicate that, while for building brand awareness mobile advertising is a good fit, when targeting individuals further down the sales funnel who are closer to conversion, using media channels that have higher desktop usage might make more sense.

Most social media platforms see a much higher usage via mobile than desktop, with data from Statista showing that in H2 2023, only 12.65% of worldwide visits to YouTube were via desktop. For Facebook this is even less, with only 1.5% of Facebook users accessing the platform via desktop only in January 2022, while an additional 16.7% used both desktop and mobile. The highest desktop usage for social media is seen on LinkedIn, but even on that platform 57% of users gain access via mobile, according to data from LinkedIn.

As desktop and mobile both play an important role in the advertising journey, schools should be utilizing both for advertising. Mobile is where the target audience is throughout their day, so this provides ample opportunity for brand awareness and recognition across social, apps, search and video. However, you want to ensure that your advertising also runs on desktop, especially when it comes to re-marketing to an already engaged audience, or advertising on a highly targeted website.