A recent report from Adobe Analytics is adding some substantial weight to several other reports related to U.S. mobile use trends, showing that internet traffic has predominately gone mobile. In fact, the shift from desktop to mobile, in terms of web usage, is pretty dramatic. Following the analysis of over 150 billion visits to websites across 400 websites and applications from the start of 2015 shows an increase of 68 percent in the U.S. over that time frame. Over the same time frame, visits to websites tracked by Adobe – which includes anonymous and aggregated data from companies on Adobe Experience Cloud – have declined on every other platform. For tablets, the drop has been around 16 percent, while desktop web usage has declined a staggering 30 percent.
Beyond those initial numbers, most users aren’t finding websites by going directly to them, but are being redirected to websites from Google search and other sources. By the numbers, that accounts for 61 percent of web users. Of those users, 60 percent find websites by Google search, while Facebook accounts for another 16 percent – with “other” making up the remaining 23 percent. Although millennials dependence on applications is on the rise, it isn’t necessarily true that most of those redirects come from apps either. According to Adobe, apps on smartphones are opened 22 percent less than at the beginning of 2016. Tablets have fared worse, with a 50 percent decline.
As to which sites benefited from the shift, year-over-year for Q2 2017, Adobe says that news took made up the bulk of website traffic – with a 52 percent gain on smartphones and a 15 percent gain on tablets. Adobe attributes the increase in news visits to the recent trend over the past couple of years for U.S. Presidents to make announcements via social media. That’s followed by retail sites and travel web pages, which saw 31 and 25 percent gains, respectively on mobile. On both of those fronts, tablet traffic was down, though desktop traffic increased by two percent in travel site visits. For the remaining four categories listed by Adobe – including automotive, banking and investment, auto, home, and life insurance, and media and entertainment, site traffic was also down for tablets and either down or stagnant for desktop use. Meanwhile, mobile visits grew by 24 percent, 20 percent, 19 percent, and 8 percent, respectively.