Decoding Advertising Buzzwords: Mobile Optimization

Our phones are, at this point, basically an extension of ourselves. In fact, according to a recent report, nearly 60% of all online traffic is driven by smartphones.

Year after year, people are spending more and more time on their mobile devices, and as the breadth of what they can do for us continues to increase, so does their importance to the success of the marketing industry.

There is nothing more annoying than checking out a website on your desktop or laptop computer, leaving the house, trying to show a friend the same content you were just viewing, and realizing that the page is lagging because you’re on your phone.

In this day and age, there is no excuse for differentiation in quality from device to device.

That’s where mobile optimization comes in.

In simple terms, mobile optimization is the idea that visitors who are viewing your site from a mobile device like a phone or tablet should have the same experience as the customer who’s surfing the web at home from their desktop computer.

In order for your webpage to be successfully wired to fit mobile devices specific needs, there are a few things you need to consider.

The things that annoy us about the internet are only emphasized when we deal with these same things on a smaller screen.

For instance, pop up ads. Sure, they’re a pain regardless of what platform you’re viewing them on, but on a phone, they’re generally harder to quickly click out of.

Responsiveness is another common issue. Because of hardware issues, sometimes code needs to be modified to better fit with mobile devices. Simplify when you can, get rid of pages with lots of redirects, and the process will be a much smoother one for your customers.

Like a lot of what we talk about on this blog, the smallest changes can make all the difference, and almost any ad agency can put them into practice relatively easily.

I can say from personal experience that when I visit a webpage from my phone and have mobile optimization issues, I’m immediately left with a bad taste in my mouth for that brand, regardless of all the positive experiences I may have had with them in the past.

Take the time to do a quick audit of your sites responsiveness across all of the platforms your customers might be accessing them from.

You’ll be saving them a lot of headaches, and increasing your brand image at the same time.