Affiliate Window’s mobile data is drawn from over 3.5m network transactions each month across 1,600 advertisers spanning the retail, travel and telecoms sectors. Clients we work with include John Lewis, Marks & Spencer, Sky, British Telecom and lastminute.com.
Working with around half the top 100 retail brands in the UK as well as over 1,000 SMEs allows us to build a comprehensive picture of the mobile landscape.
Having seen strong performance heading into the final quarter of the year, Q4 activity went from strength to strength – buoyed by a mobile Christmas. Q4 2014 saw 43.49% of traffic originate from a mobile device. This was up from 38.27% the previous quarter and 31.19% in Q4 2013. The Christmas period saw us exceed 50% of traffic originating from a mobile device for the first time and on three consecutive days – Boxing Day through to the 28th December. The Boxing Day peak saw us record 51.73% of traffic through a mobile device.
We continue to see the majority of mobile traffic across the network originate from a smartphone. This was up to 22.41% in Q4 2014 from 18.87% in Q3. Despite remaining behind smartphones in terms of traffic, tablets also saw their share increase. In Q4 this was up to 18.41% from 16.02% in Q3. This has demonstrated a significant increase in the share of traffic figures from Q4 last year from both smartphones and tablets which stood at 14.52% and 13.91% respectively.
Switching focus to sales, Q4 saw 36.19% of transactions originate from a mobile device vs. 32.02% in Q3. The strong mobile performance we had witnessed throughout the year continued into Q4. Again we saw an impressive Christmas period with the share of mobile sales peaking at 46.67% on Christmas Day.
The increase in mobile transactions was seen across both tablets and smartphones (20.80% and 15.01% vs. 19.35% and 12.22% the previous quarter).
Q4 saw the share of iPhone traffic increase at the expense of Android – standing at 70.56% and 26.41% respectively. iPhone continues to dominate across the network both in terms of traffic and sales and the share of sales was up to 73.61% vs. 25.93 for Android.
We continue to see a significant disconnect when it comes to Android tablets. Despite an increase in traffic to 38.91% in Q4 (up from 31.92%), sales remain well behind with just 21.63% of transactions generated from an Android tablet (although this was up from 18.52% in Q3. The trend of Android users browsing but not purchasing through their tablets remains a consistent theme. iPad users continue to convert at a much greater rate.
Mobile conversion rates increased to 4.57% (from 3.92%) in Q4 while desktop conversion rates increased to 4.57% (from 5.37%)
Average order values for Q4 were down for both desktop and tablet, while smartphone AOV was up on what we saw for Q3.
You can find an in depth breakdown of our monthly mobile stats here. If you are interested in being kept up to date on all things mobile, please sign up to receive our monthly strategy newsletter.
