By Brad Beckstrom.
You’re watching a show and you can’t remember the actor’s name so you grab your smart phone and visit IMDb. A sport’s stat on ESPN prompts a friendly disagreement and the smartphones come out in search of the truth. Or, if you’re like me, you may not even be using the TV to watch a show at all. You may be using it to stream music through Pandora while running a slideshow through Flickr so you can get back to that book on your iPad.
A recent study released by Google noted that 77% of TV viewers use another device while watching TV in a typical day. So you’re not alone in your ADD. These simultaneous activities can often be complementary usage, for example “doing a quick price check on a product being advertised” versus multitasking, ”clearing out some old emails while watching a rerun.”
In either case, the vast majority of these TV viewers will be visiting your site on a mobile device. There are two other things, TV viewers will be distracted, and they won’t stay long. If you want their attention, it’s very important to assure they land on a page with a great call to action and free of clutter.
There are several options here, the first is to make your entire site responsive to mobile devices, especially smartphones. This way you’ll be sure to present a page that is acceptable to a mobile user and easy to navigate. Another option is to use code that detects mobile devices and sends them to a landing page on your website designed specifically for those users.
To come up with the best solution for your business, blog or website you should think about how users may come across links to your site. Do you include links to your site in emails? Is your product advertised or promoted on TV? Have you thought about using Google AdWords for mobile or Facebook mobile ads to promote your product or service? All of these will have an immediate impact on the number of mobile visitors to your site. You should also install and use Google Analytics on your site to get a feel for the current number of visitors arriving via mobile devices. Don’t depend on analytics alone as it often shows you what users are working with on your site versus what they want. Reach out to us if you need help coming up with the full picture.