iPad Users Twice as Engaged on Desktop Websites

Analytics · By On · 7 Comments

Last week, I was look­ing at a large data set to con­firm the “pre-launch” iPad engage­ment num­bers I men­tioned in my prior post on the impact of mobile opti­mized expe­ri­ences. Post-launch num­bers con­firmed vis­i­tors using the iPad were much more engaged when pre­sented the standard/desktop ver­sion of a web­site than when those users received the mobile-optimized ver­sion. For the par­tic­u­lar data set I reviewed (see chart below), engage­ment lev­els were 160% higher for iPad users on the stan­dard site than for iPad users on the mobile site. You’ll also note iPhone users are more engaged on the mobile-optimized ver­sion of the site.

iPad and iPhone engagement on mobile sites

Before you run off and tell your tech team to alter your browser redi­rec­tion strat­egy, you’ll want to con­firm this behav­ior on your own data set. How­ever, as you can see from the chart above, pro­vid­ing the right expe­ri­ence to the right set of users can sig­nif­i­cantly improve engagement.

Right device, wrong expe­ri­ence

I was shar­ing these find­ings with a col­league and he men­tioned vis­it­ing a web­site on the iPad where he was forced to the mobile site and was unable to browse back to the stan­dard site to reach the spe­cific con­tent he needed. I had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence last Mon­day, while brows­ing the web on my iPhone using the newly installed Opera Mini for iPhone browser. Some sites I vis­ited pre­sented the full ver­sion even though the opti­mal expe­ri­ence would have been the mobile version.

For­tu­nately, nei­ther of these issues are dif­fi­cult to cor­rect if you know the right way to iden­tify devices and browsers. One of the most com­mon meth­ods of mobile device detec­tion is to exam­ine the User-Agent (a bit of code in the page’s http header) for attrib­utes indi­cat­ing a mobile browser.

Here’s where it gets tricky: the iPad Opera Mini User-Agent looks iden­ti­cal to the iPhone Opera Mini User-Agent.  Sites (cor­rectly) redi­rect­ing Opera Mini users on mobile devices to their mobile site will also be send­ing iPad users there.

iPhone and iPad Opera Mini User-Agent:

Opera/9.80 (iPhone; Opera Mini/5.0.0176/764; U; en) Presto/2.4.15

Give Users a Choice

While browser detec­tion and redi­rec­tion for mobile devices can be a very good thing and often yields sig­nif­i­cant increases to vis­i­tor engage­ment, the issues above illus­trate why users should always have the option to change which ver­sion of your site they are viewing.

  • http://webanalyticsland.com VaBeachKevin

    Can you tell me what met­rics you are using to define engage­ment in your example?

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/ehewett Ed Hewett

      I used page views per daily unique vis­i­tor because of the media-centric busi­ness model of the data set. For your own analy­sis, I rec­om­mend sub­sti­tut­ing page views for some­thing rel­e­vant to the par­tic­u­lar busi­ness model being ana­lyzed (e.g. rev­enue, leads, etc.).

  • http://www.rudishumpert.com Rudi Shumpert

    Ed,

    Inter­est­ing read. I won­der though if the engage­ment is more to do with the play­ing with the new toy/iPad than the dif­fer­ences in which site was served up.

    I would love to see the same test/set of met­rics in a few months when the nov­elty of the iPad has worn off.

    –Rudi

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/ehewett Ed Hewett

      Great idea Rudi! I believe these num­bers rep­re­sent a fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence in how users inter­act with tablet devices as opposed to mobile devices but I’ll do a fol­low up post in a cou­ple months once the “new” fac­tor has worn off.

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/ehewett Ed Hewett

      Rudi-thought you’d like to know iPad usage con­tin­ues to fol­low the pro­file I high­light above. Updated num­bers can be found in this post: Three Rea­sons You Should Ignore the Experts.

  • http://www.sonomapartners.com/ Ms Dynam­ics CRM

    My house­mate had an IPad and I would always get frus­trated when I was sent to mobile sites rather than the nor­mal ones. As a user, it just seemed counter intu­itive to go to a mobile site as I was on a laptop(I know this is not true, but I think many peo­ple share my sen­ti­ment that the IPad is more sim­i­lar to a note­book than a smart phone).

    Now that the IPad II has launched, are sites more cog­nizant of the data illus­trated above(corroborated by your link from 9÷9÷10) and send­ing users to the appro­pri­ate site type? Like me, not every­one is tech­ni­cally savvy enough to rec­og­nize if they are on a “mobile” site or not. Thus, if they per­ceive that “what they see is what they get”, and do not like the way it looks, they may not seek a way to access the site. Instead, they just won’t return to the when using a tablet in the future.

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/ehewett Ed Hewett

      Good points. Many site own­ers have cer­tainly improved which devices receive which expe­ri­ences over the last year and a half. How­ever, site own­ers shouldn’t “set and for­get” these busi­ness rules given the rapid expan­sion in the cat­e­gories of devices users are access­ing online con­tent through (tablet, tv, e-readers) as well as changes in form fac­tors in exist­ing cat­e­gories like mobile.