1. Mobile Web vs Mobile Apps: Where Should You Invest Your Marketing? -
Whiteboard Friday§
Mobile's been a hot topic for a while now. We know it's not something to be ignored, but
when it comes to different mobile mediums, it can be tricky to determine where to focus
your efforts. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over the differences between
marketing via mobile apps and mobile web, examines some criteria that can help guide
your decision, and speculates about the future of the mobile world in general.
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week
we're going to chat a little bit about the mobile world and specifically whether we should
be investing our mobile marketing efforts into the mobile web — meaning a website that
is responsive and adaptive or just specifically designed for mobile browsers — or
whether we should be worried about building a mobile app to help draw in traffic and
gain customers and users. I think these two worlds are actually quite different.
So I spent a bunch of time recently here internally at Moz going through a huge number
of statistics, trying to gather as much data as I could to understand these two worlds, and I
thought I'd share that with you. I'll give a bunch of links in this presentation, probably a
good dozen of them that I'll make sure are in there.
Sources:
 Pew Internet: Smartphone Use in 2015§
 Comscore & MarketingLand: Apps Eat Digital Media Time§
 Morgan Stanley & MarketingLand: No, Apps Aren't Winning, the Mobile
Browser Is§
 IAB Study & MarketingLand: Despite Time Spent, Mobile Web Just as Important
as Apps§
 Fred Wilson [AVC]: Mobile Web is Top of Funnel, Mobile Web is Bottom of

2. Funnel§
 MarketingLand: Search is Number One Content Discovery Tool for Mobile
Users§
 SimilarWeb & Clickz: Why Mobile Web Still Matters in 2015§
 Andrew Chen: Mobile App Retention Rates§
 Smart Insights: Mobile Marketing Statistics§
 Think with Google: Mobile Path to Purchase§
 Comscore: 2015 Mobile App Report§
 Forrester: Mobile Users Spend 80% of Time in Just 5 Apps§
 Nielsen: So Many Apps, So Much More Time for Entertainment§
 TechCrunch & Nielsen: An Upper Limit for Apps§
 TechCrunch & Forrester: Only 5 Apps See Heavy Use§
 VentureBeat: Mobile Browser Traffic is 2X Bigger than App Traffic§
 Quartz and Comscore: Most Smartphone Users Download 0 Apps per Month§
Mobile web qualities
Just to give you a broad overview, basically the mobile web kind of looks like this.
There's a lot less time spent in the mobile web, meaning on mobile websites on a mobile
device, than there is in the world of apps — far, far less time spent. But weirdly, and this
is very strange but confirmed by several different sources, there's more traffic overall,
meaning more unique people making more different visits, which makes a little bit of
sense when you think about how those things are done. Remember that a visit to a web
page is a much less intense activity than loading up a mobile app and then spending time
in it. So sure that can make some sense.
It's also growing faster. So the mobile web is about two times bigger in terms of raw
traffic, and it is growing faster than the mobile app world, which will also make sense in
a sec when we talk about apps.

3. This is Morgan Stanley data. I think they're using comScore as one of their sources, and
there's another one that backs this up as well.
Mobile traffic is also highly distributed, and you can see that in everyone's numbers,
everyone from SimilarWeb to comScore to Nielsen. They're all reporting this. It's a lot
like desktop, which again makes sense.
It's not that we spend all our time on just a few websites. In fact, because so much of the
time that we spend on the web in desktop is on Facebook's website and on YouTube's
website, and that is mostly app traffic in the mobile web, the long tail looks really long
when it comes to the mobile web. There's essentially tons of people visiting tons and tons
of different websites all across there, I think on average visiting a few hundred to a few
thousand unique websites in a month across mobile browsing.
For the mobile web, search, social, and word of mouth or type in or bookmarking, those
are the big sources of mobile referrals, which isn't surprising. Those are pretty big on
desktop as well.
So pretty distributed broad system here. A lot of similarities to the desktop web. We're
pretty familiar with this world.
Mobile app world
Mobile app world qualities, kind of different though. Apps dominate. I mean dominate
like they crush the times that we spend on mobile devices. So you might have seen Mary
Meeker's State the Internet Report for this year showing that mobile traffic in 2014
eclipsed desktop traffic.
Desktop traffic is weird. It basically kept growing, growing, growing from 1990 to 2010,
and then it's basically today almost exactly where it is in 2010. Weirdly, I think a good
trivia question would be, "Do people spend more or less time on desktops today than they

4. did five years ago?" Of course, we would all say, "Well, they spend less." But actually we
spend a teensy, tinsy bit more than we did then.
It's just that mobile has gone crazy. Mobile has eaten up all of the rest of the time in our
lives. We don't see our friends or family any more. We don't eat meals. We just browse
our mobile devices.
So mobile is about 85% to 90% depending on the source of time spent on mobile. It's
your YouTubes and your Facebooks and all those kinds of things.
It sends and receives far fewer referrals. So basically, most of the ways that people are
getting to apps is not from another app or from a website. It's directly from the launcher.
They're going to their home screen. They're clicking on that app. That makes pretty good
sense.
But they're also not sending out as much traffic. So if you're browsing Facebook on a
mobile device, it seems like, on average, you're less likely to click on to a mobile web
link and then load up a web page versus maybe if you're browsing Facebook on the
desktop web, which also makes sense. You want to stay in the app that you're in. Mobile
speeds are slow or especially outside of countries where 4G and LTE are common.
The top 25 to 50 apps in mobile — and it depends on who you ask — some sources are
showing that just the top 5 apps are responsible for 80% to 90% of all app usage. This is
data from Forrester and data from comScore. Marketing Land did some work on this.
So what we're essentially saying here is if you're not in the top 25 to 50 apps on a
platform, you're probably getting very little mobile app activity, because it turns out that
the long tail is nowhere near like it is on the mobile web. People don't visit hundreds and
thousands of apps. They visit just a few.

5. In fact, the average mobile owner uses about 24 apps per month, 24 unique apps per
month and visits between 10 and 30 times as many unique websites in a given month.
Seven percent of heavy app users (so the people who download the most apps, who use
the most apps), they're responsible actually for 50%, a full half of all download activities.
So it's sort of a small subset of app users who just go crazy. They download every app
that they can. They treat apps like websites. They have this huge long tail. But for the
93% of the rest of us, a little bit different.
Most new discovery for mobile apps comes from three sources -- mobile web, word of
mouth, or app store top lists. That tends to be how we get to the app world.
So these two are very, very different. They're different in usage. They're different in how
they operate. They're different in how you would need to do marketing around them.
Things every business needs to optimize for mobile web
It's my general opinion, based on what I've seen about the mobile web, that every
business needs to optimize for the mobile web, and you have to optimize in a few ways.
That means you must have responsive or adaptive design. It's not just an option any more.

6. In fact, the average mobile owner uses about 24 apps per month, 24 unique apps per
month and visits between 10 and 30 times as many unique websites in a given month.
Seven percent of heavy app users (so the people who download the most apps, who use
the most apps), they're responsible actually for 50%, a full half of all download activities.
So it's sort of a small subset of app users who just go crazy. They download every app
that they can. They treat apps like websites. They have this huge long tail. But for the
93% of the rest of us, a little bit different.
Most new discovery for mobile apps comes from three sources -- mobile web, word of
mouth, or app store top lists. That tends to be how we get to the app world.
So these two are very, very different. They're different in usage. They're different in how
they operate. They're different in how you would need to do marketing around them.
Things every business needs to optimize for mobile web
It's my general opinion, based on what I've seen about the mobile web, that every
business needs to optimize for the mobile web, and you have to optimize in a few ways.
That means you must have responsive or adaptive design. It's not just an option any more.