In advance of attending the Mid Atlantic Innkeepers Conference (MAI) this year, I took the time to review each of the attendees Websites to see how many Innkeepers had invested in a Mobile Site, and how many hadn’t.
As you can see from the graphic, a whopping 50% had not!
Then I came across a Forbes Article published in November of 2013 that basically said…
“If you’ve ignored previous warnings and your business isn’t taking advantage of responsive web design right now or planning on it in the very near future, you are in danger of going out of business in 2014.”
If the author of this article is correct, then 50% of the MAI attendees this year are in danger of going out of business in 2014. And that’s just a sampling of Inns that happened to attend that conference. There are simply hundreds, if not thousands of Innkeepers across the country who haven’t yet realized the imminent need to invest in a Mobile Site.
That said, I wanted to know if in our Industry what kind of statistics could I pull together to determine if Innkeeper’s who DO NOT HAVE A MOBILE SITE could expect a fate as dire as the Forbes writer indicates. You know me and statistics, so I began to dig, and this is what I found.
Indeed, YOUR GUESTS are moving from using a Desktop Display to view your site, to a Mobile or Tablet device. Just in the last year alone Mobile and Tablet Traffic on Innkeeper Websites has grown almost 10%, bringing your total visitors using a Mobile or Tablet device to whopping average of 30%. Can you really afford to lose 30% of your hard earned visitor traffic simply because you haven’t yet invested in a Mobile site for your Guests to use on the device of their choice?
Think about it! You pay directories to bring you traffic, if you are well placed in Google Local, Organic or Maps, you have worked hard or paid someone else to work hard for you to have the privilege of being at the top of the heap. You might even be paying for PPC (pay per click) ads to bring people to your site, and once they get there, they “Bounce” away because you haven't invested in a Mobile site they can use easily. I’m not making this up folks, check out the info graphic below, and then go review your own Google Analytics.
Slowly but surely, more and more Guests are going to “Bounce” off of a Non-Mobile site. We see more “Bounces” today than last year, and that trend is going to continue into the future. When your competitors invest in Mobile and you don’t, you won’t have to look far to see where you Guests have gone.
And to make matters worse, not only are you adding insult to injury, you are most likely paying, one way or another, to get a Guest to your Web site only to lose them. And it’s only going to get worse. Experts are predicting Mobile users to continue to grow substantially in the next few years, to where they will overtake Desktop users.
But there is a solution to reverse Guests from “Bouncing” away from your site. Take a look at the results of a sampling of our Responsive Turnkey and Custom Mobile Designs below.
These client’s “Bounce” rates are being driven down, across the board on Mobile, Tablet and Desktop displays by providing their Guests with what they want: A Responsive Mobile design that meets Google’s Speed and Usability standards. We see Guests sticking around longer and looking at the content on the site. Which is way more conducive to making a sale than having your Guests leave the second they get to your site. A Non-Mobile site typically loads slowly and when your Guests can’t maneuver it easily, they walk (“Bounce”) away.
A Responsive Mobile Design solves that problem, and keeps your business on track.
BOTTOM LINE: The trend shows that if you don’t provide a quality Mobile site for you guests, you indeed will continue to lose guests who do happen to find your site, simply because they will not stick around (IE: they will “Bounce” off) rather than try to maneuver a desktop version of your site on a Mobile device, and you will lose business.
If you do not have a Mobile presence today, once you arrive at the conclusion that MOBILE IS ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED, we highly suggest you follow Google’s guidelines when having one built, which also corresponds to the advice in the Forbes article, and choose a Responsive Design to meet both Google’s Speed and Usability Requirements.
Lisa Kolb
President and Co-Founder
Acorn Internet Services, Inc.
