A report published today by research firm eMarketer reveals projections for mobile search spending over the next four years. As of 2015, mobile search spending in the US is projected to surpass desktop search spending.
Search spending includes companies putting money into both PPC ads and organic SEO, taking into consideration both smartphones and tablets. These projections are tremendous considering last year mobile accounted for only a quarter of all search spending.
However, it’s interesting to note that although marketers are spending more on mobile they are not necessarily getting more out of it. ROI on mobile search spend will continue to trail desktop search next year, although its improving.
The reason for this, eMarketer points out, is that measuring performance on mobile needs to get more precise, particularly when it concerns the impact on sales in physical stores.
Majority of Mobile Traffic Coming From iOS
With all of this mobile searching and browsing going on, where is most of the traffic coming from? Data from analytics firm Quantcast, reported by Cnet, reveals that iOS traffic is up slightly while Android traffic is dropping.
More specifically, web traffic from iOS devices in the US is sitting at 61.4 percent after the launch of iPhone 6, while traffic from Android devices accounts for 37.5 percent of mobile web traffic. This is indicative of increased adoption of iOS devices, and perhaps even Android users jumping ship to iOS.
Even though Android is the leader when it comes to market share in the US, significantly more mobile browsing is being done on iOS. Why is that? Analyst Gene Munster believes it boils down to Apple’s iPad:
As a starting point, Kantar research estimates iPhone US market share is 33 percent. We believe that iOS users are likely more engaged with their phones on a daily basis than Android users. Third, we believe that iOS’ contribution from tablets, which are likely to generate more traffic than a smartphone, is currently greater than Android’s.
Quantcast’s data is taken from l2 billion mobile page views per month. The research firm also estimates that 150 million smartphones are used in the US, which each one generating around 15 page views per day.
