3 Things Every Retailer Should Know About Mobile Visitors

2. Smartphone conversions are pegged at 1 percent, but you also need to think about the other 99 percent. Just as traffic tools inform you about your top pages, survey tools like iPerceptions or Feedbackify can tell you what the specific visitor tasks are. Combined with actual sales data and your sales funnels, you'll get a pretty good picture of your site's health, assuming you keep mobile and desktop/laptop traffic separate.

Here's where the qualitative survey tools really prove to be handy: Smartphone sales conversions are pegged at 1 percent. If those numbers are accurate, 99 out of every 100 mobile visitors you have are doing something OTHER than buying from you. That's not to say that you're not making money from those 99 visitors — some of them are checking store locations, others are checking your price lists and comparing them to competitors, and others are looking for your contact numbers. Some of those 99 visitors will convert on desktops, laptops, tablets or even in your brick-and-mortar stores, but only if their experience with you didn't suck.

If you're focusing on more than just the sale, then their experience won't suck. You would know that 30 percent of your visitors are trying to check your price list, and you would devote resources to creating an awesome user experience for visitors performing that task. You would know that a fourth of your mobile visitors are trying to find store locations, and that half of them are failing — and you would reallocate budget towards fixing that aspect of your website.

The point is that there are all these micro-conversions happening before you have your macro-conversion — the sale. Those micro-conversions add up, and you should fix the most common ones and the ones that need the most work. To do that efficiently, you need to know what the tasks are and what the failure rates are. And for that, qualitative tools are required.