Today I red an interesting article on Forbes The Digital Economy Is The New "App Economy" By Ross Mauri, IBM.
According to the annual IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark results, overall online sales rose 13.9 percent for the 2014 holiday season. Cyber shopping during November and December set another record high, while mobile traffic accounted for 45 percent of all online traffic. On Black Friday, for example, mobile devices accounted for one-in-four online purchases. In essence, with this increasing reliance on mobile devices, the digital economy is rapidly become the app economy.
Since I'm a proud Amazon's Associate since August 2014, I too have some data to report. In short, yes last Black Friday and Cyber Monday helped me to earn pretty decent income, it started with $704.00 in November and grown to best so far $2029.00 in December.
Tracking Outbound links
I'm using Google Analytics to track my blog's progress over time, and I have set there event based goals to track clicks on outgoing links (Links to Amazon, for example)
Clicks to Amazon (Black Friday)
As you can see from image above desktop users still are the majority with 64.89% of total visitors on November 28, 2014 (Black Friday), leaving mobile users (26.03%) second and tablet users third (9.08%).
Now, the interesting part comes here - while total mobile user count was 26.03%, there were 50.65% outgoing clicks to Amazon store from mobile users, while only 33.87% from desktops and 15.48% from tablets.
Clicks to Amazon Cyber Monday
You will find pretty the same scenario on December 1, 2014 (Cyber Monday) as well. While there are 69.26% of total users coming to my blog from desktop, just 38.31% desktop users were clicking on Amazon outgoing links. Mobile users kept first place with 46.20% of outgoing links to Amazon.
Now - I must admit - both of Black Friday and Cyber Monday were the best in terms of income report for my blog, still I would like to see more overall picture of full November and December 2014
Outgoing Clicks to Amazon November - December
Well - I'm not seeing here nothing unusual (different from first two images) - while desktop users still are the majority of my blog visitors (69.41%), mobile users (49.15) are more into clicking to outgoing links to Amazon, and (probably) making any further purchases there.
In over days, I believe there is a lot of misunderstanding of mobile users, desktop users, tablet users e.t.c.
There are folks claiming that mobile has overtaken desktop already in 2013, or 2014, well I believe there is a lot of such websites, which primary audience comes from mobile devices, but I wouldn't call it 100% sure for all web. In my case, there are still 69% of visitors visiting my blog from desktop computers.
Yes I agree - more people are clicking on Amazon links browsing my blog from their mobile devices and hopefully making purchases, earning me minimal but fair commission.
Another interesting pattern - bounce rates are lower for mobile and tablet devices that for desktop. The same applies for average session duration, for mobile and tablet users it's higher than for desktop.
It will be interesting to observe what will bring year of 2015.