Our Share of Visits from iPads is up 23% Since Christmas

iPad Share of Visits Up 23%

In the month before Christmas, 13.2% of our unique visits came from iPads. In the seven days since Christmas, that has leapt to 16.2%. That’s a whopping 23% increase in a matter of weeks.

I guess plenty of our customers received iPads for Christmas!

Is It Just Technophiles?

Who are these gadget-hungry consumers, you ask?

Well… it turns out they’re not Fab’s hip design-lovers. And they’re not a bunch of geeky dads who finally have a much-anticipated tech gizmo to play with.

No.

Our site sells knitting wool.

Our customers are, by and large, knitters. Someone looking for a dozen balls of Rowan Pure Wool DK or a new pair of knitting needles isn’t the most likely to be using the latest technology. And that’s why this is particularly noteworthy. These are everyday people — a fair proportion are middle-aged women — and, according to Google Analytics, 26.0% of them are now using mobile devices to visit our site (up from 22.7% before Christmas).

The One Mobile Device You Should Worry About Above All Others

So what should we take away from this?

First, in case you were trying to ignore it, ‘mobile’ is clearly a very real factor in today’s e-commerce. Significant numbers of ordinary people are now using mobile devices to buy stuff online.

But let’s be more specific. ‘Mobile’ might conjure up images of smartphones. And that wouldn’t be accurate when nearly two-thirds of our mobile visits are from just one familiar (non-phone) device. At least for now, if you run an e-commerce site, there’s one mobile device I suggest you worry about before all the others: the iPad.

How about you? Have you also seen a big increase in iPad traffic on your site? If so, how are you optimising your site for it?