All Top UK Advertiser Sites Now Mobile-optimised – Well Almost

Harveys94 per cent of the top 50 UK advertisers, or 47 of them in round figures, have a mobile-optimised site, according to new research released today by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) UK. The IAB has chosen not to name and shame the three that don’t, but we have asked the question. (Update – the three are: Colgate, Outside Clinic and Saga.)

The IAB carried out a Mobile User Experience Audit, looking at the user experience of the mobile sites of the top 50 advertisers by media spend in the UK. The study focuses on the quality of advertiser sites based on seven key mobile user experience measures, namely:

• Site load speeds (using Google PageSpeed Insights tool)
• Site search is prominent at all times
• Menu is short and concise
• The site exploits mobile-specific functionality, such as GPS store locators and click-to-call
• Product images are expandable and easily viewed on a mobile device
• Data capture forms are optimised for mobile via the use of list options and providing relevant keypads (e.g. numeric, where the form is asking the user to input numbers)
• The overall look and feel is built for mobile

The top 10 makes for interesting reading. Nine of the top 10 are retail sites, but perhaps not the ones you might have expected to see at the top of the tree. Harveys Furniture Store leads the pack, followed by Very.co.uk, Asda, Tesco and Boots. The last five places in the top 10 are occupied by Amazon, Oak Furniture Land, Argos, Morrisons and Asda respectively.

46 per cent (23) of the top 50 UK advertisers have a responsive web design site, while 48 per cent (24) had a dedicated mobile site. All bar two of the top 10 (Asda and AXA) have a dedicated mobile site.

“Its great to see that 94 per cent of the top advertisers in the UK have an optimised site which reflects where people are choosing to spend their connected time,” said Mike Reynolds, mobile manager at the IAB. “It was interesting to see that separate mobile sites scored higher against the user experience measures we looked at. This highlights the need for those advertisers approaching mobile with responsive web design to think differently about the content they serve on mobile devices, and pull in the unique functionality that makes mobile such an engaging device.”

Sam Barton, head of user experience at Very.co.uk parent company, Shop Direct Group, said that for the company, designing for mobile is about creating fast and efficient cross-device experiences, and driving improvements via A/B testing.

“Experiments enable us to make quick and nimble changes to our websites, removing assumptions, to learn which ideas improve key metrics and should be iterated upon, and which ideas need to fail fast,” said Barton. “We also moved our mobile research, design and development teams in house to foster creativity, innovation and collaboration, and invested in technology which enables quicker build of mobile experiments, where in some regards best practices are still being established.
“We also developed a world class front-of-house UX Lab in the building to bring the customer to the heart of our work. The UX Lab is used to fuel hypothesis for mobile experiments, as well as understand why experiments succeed or fail through user studies, eye-tracking and workshops”.

Mobile accounts for 50 per cent of Very.co.uk’s online sales, and 61 per cent of the company’s digital spend goes on mobile.