Online marketing firm Monetate puts out a quarterly report, like an increasing number of digital marketing firms today. Using customer data, its “EQ1” (2013) report offers a range of metrics, including e-commerce conversions by channel/platform and average order value. It also breaks out traffic by device category and browser.
This report like others shows that iOS devices are generating a great deal more web traffic than their Android counterparts, which is mysterious given Android’s market share dominance. In addition Monetate now shows roughly equal distribution between tablet and smartphone-generated traffic.
According to the chart below smartphone and tablet traffic has roughly doubled since Q1 2012. Tablets are now driving slightly more web traffic to Monetate customers than smartphones. Over all “mobile” traffic is 21%.
Despite Android’s market-share lead the iPhone is responsible for almost two-thirds of smartphone-based traffic to Monetate-client websites. In the tablet arena Monetate says that just under 90% of traffic is coming from the iPad, with Android tablets (including Kindle Fire) generating just under 11%.
One of the more interesting charts shows browser market share. What we can observe from the data in the chart below are the following:
- The decline of IE; Firefox has also lost ground
- The growth of mobile Safari and slight decline of desktop Safari (together equaling 27% combined market share)
- The Android browser has gained a little under 2 points and mobile Chrome has grown to just under 1% share since last year
- Opera almost doesn’t register
- Kindle’s browser share is flat
If all the Android browsers are combined (assuming that mobile Chrome is mostly Android users) we see that Android’s aggregate browser share is just over 5%. If PC browsers are excluded it would be larger however.
According to StatCounter, among mobile browsers only, mobile Safari has about 53% market share to Android’s roughly 36% (with 11% combined other). Notably Chrome has 3.2% according to StatCounter.
Various theories have been advanced about why iOS devices are responsible for more web traffic than their Android counterparts, given Android’s market share lead (in the smartphone arena). But none of them are entirely satisfactory.