It’s been 3 weeks since the iPad was released and initial the media frenzy has died down a bit, along with the digital marketing industry’s fascination with the device has subsided a bit. However, for those of us responsible for tracking the activity of visitors on “traditional” web sites, the captivation just is only beginning. Early questions amongst the SwellPath team revolved around how much iPad traffic we would see on our clients’ non-mobile sites, and what kind of engagement would iPad visitors exhibit? Beyond those, would we see different navigational behavior from iPad visitors, and different conversion rates?
SwellPath account coordinator Chris Sullivan dug into Google Analytics last week and pulled data for the first 2-weeks of the iPad’s life (4/3/2010 through 4/16/2010). Overall, the results weren’t mind-blowing, but it was interesting to compare the percentage of total visits that visited via iPads, and the number of pages per visit by these visitors.
Business-to-Business Sites
First, we compared 4 B2B sites that who have a majority (or all) of their customer base working in IT or technology related roles. Here are some highlights:
- For the 2-week period as a whole, .18% of visits came from an iPad
- The average of daily percentages rose from .18% in week 1, to .21% in week 2
- The total increase in iPad visits from week 1 to week 2 was 8.7%
- The average pages per visit for iPad visitors was 2.95, 16.1% less than the 3.52 average for all visits.
Business-to-Consumer Sites
Next up we looked at 3 B2C brands with ecommerce components of their sites. Here’s what we found from them:
- For the 2-week period, only .11% of visits from the iPad
- The average of daily percentages rose almost doubled from .08% in week 1 to .15% in week 2
- The total increase in iPad visits from week 1 to week 2 was about 116%
- The average pages per visit for iPad visitors was 9.28, only 1.35% less than the 9.41 average for all visits
Additional Findings
There are some other interesting findings, but the sampling of data is so small enough that we don’t want to put much weight on the things just yet. One of the major sources of iPad traffic to the B2B sites was news articles about the companies; without the press, the overall percentages would have been a bit lower. Along those lines, we don’t have clients focused entirely on media, but we have worked a bit with a magazine that caters to a more affluent younger customer base; about .22% of their traffic was from iPads. So, users seem to be initially using the iPad for media consumption, as expected.
More…
The data is a week old now, so I did a quick check in today to see how things were trending. I focused only on sites with at least 100,000 visits per month. The number of visits from iPads is definitely trending upward; rates vary between about 10% and as much as 18%.
How about as a percentage of mobile devices? Google Analytics lumps the iPad traffic in with other mobile devices, but I’m sure many would argue that the iPad isn’t really a mobile device. As a mobile device, it shows up in the top 5 mobile devices on most sites we looked at.
There obviously are some takeaways from this process, but still some unknowns and we have to remember we are working with a very small sampling of data. I plan on checking back in with this in a month or so, after we have a couple full months worth of data, and we can see the impact of the iPad with 3G.
Tags: iPad, iPad measurement, mobile analytics
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