Sleepy Spanish sofa surfers and US night owls: Mobile personas uncover web behaviours

Netbiscuits have released its quarterly web trends report analysing user behaviour on the mobile web across 242 countries.

@Netbiscuits discovered over 4,000 unique devices, across more than 200 vendors and 26 operating systems, an increase of 8% unique mobile handsets and 30% more tablets compared to 3 months ago.

Using the data, Netbiscuits was able to group together factors, such as screen size and speed of connectivity against the proportion of web traffic to build up a picture of how these characteristics impact user engagement globally. This data is used to create personas which segment users based on their behaviour, which is hugely important for mobile marketers trying to engage with customers and gain a better understanding of how to improve conversion via mobile devices.

Morning @WebTrendsNG team! Thought you might like the latest @Netbiscuits Web Trends report – http://t.co/ZuNUa6YbQr #Africa

— Netbiscuits (@Netbiscuits) May 15, 2014

Key findings included:

• US mobile web users were the most consistently connected nation on the mobile web, with the peak share (6%) of evening surfing coming much earlier than in Europe between 5pm and 6pm
• In 26 countries, users surf the web on mobile phones with screens that are on average smaller than 3 inches. 25 of those countries are in Africa and the Ivory Coast and Lesotho are the smallest.
• Spanish web usage was staggered, with a much later start in the morning and alater spike for lunch.
• iOS has its largest share of traffic in Canada, an impressive 59%. It also has the highest proportion of the latest Android KitKat users at just over 1 in 5 of Android hits.
• Android’s largest country share of traffic is in South Korea, representing 80%. The average
• Australia is the only country in Asia Pacific where iOS share of traffic is higher than Android. Here, iOS accounted for 54% of traffic.

Around the mobile web in 90 days – @Netbiscuits insight from Q1 based on actual web use – http://t.co/ZuNUa6YbQr pic.twitter.com/jKoOzF33iy

— Netbiscuits (@Netbiscuits) May 16, 2014

In addition, the study found that 52% of all traffic came from Apple, Samsung and HTC, with other users fragmented across a vast array of other vendors and devices.

Daniel Weisbeck, COO and CMO, Netbiscuits, said: “The complexity of mobile means it is no longer just enough to know that a customer is using an iPhone or a Samsung device. Brands need to understand how device parameters, such as screen size and browser version, along with contextual elements like location and bandwidth speed, influence engagement and behavior.

Knowing your mobile visitors better can help identify reasons for abandonment and high conversion groups to target. We’ve identified a number of mobile personas which bring this data together, helping marketers make decisions based on the full picture rather than simply guesswork.”