While desktop lost 15 percent of its share of online visits in January, mobile, specifically smartphones, is on the uptick, gaining 41 percent year over year, according to a new report from Branding Brand.

Branding Brand’s Mobile Commerce Index tracked online visits, along with conversion rates and revenue through the month of January 2015 and compared numbers to January 2014. Tablet traffic and conversion also grew, though these numbers do not compare to smartphone growth, pointing to the main channel of interest that marketers should focus in on.

“The future of mobile commerce will be heavily focused on optimization and personalization,” said Joey Rahimi, CIO and co-founder of Branding Brand, Pittsburgh. “A few years ago, mobile was solely about enablement.

“Today, retailers are saying, ‘I have a smartphone site; now what?’” he said. “Whether it’s responsive or channel-specific, simply having a site isn’t enough.”

Smartphones, desktop and tablets
As far as online visits, desktop lost 15 percent and tablets lost 17 percent of their market share in the last year, while smartphones gained 41 percent.

Revenue numbers are even more in the favor of smartphones.

Regarding conversion, in January 2015, the average mobile conversion across all industries as 1.62 percent, a 16 percent increase from last year and a 30 percent year over year change in growth rate.

Desktop gained a mere 3 percent change in growth rate in conversion, while tablet outscored desktop with a 10 percent increase.

Desktop lost 6 percent of its market share in online revenue, while smartphones gained 50 percent and tablets gained 9 percent. Mobile in general grew from 19 percent of revenue in January 2014 to 24 percent in January 2015.

Therefore, mobile devices generated 24 percent of all online revenue, which is a 26 percent increase since January 2014. Smartphone revenue alone grew from 8 percent to 12 percent.

Mobile shopping
Throughout January 2015, daily smartphone and tablet visits peaked at 9pm EST. Revenue peaked at 10pm for smartphones and 9pm for tablets, proving that the most traffic occurs just before consumers retire to bed.

As far as days of the week, Sundays produced more visits and revenue than any other day of the week for smartphones as well as tablets in January 2015.

The Branding Brand Mobile Commerce Index (MCI) is a collection of data on retail Web sites specifically designed for mobile devices. Each month at Blog.BrandingBrand.com, the Index identifies commerce and consumer trends across samples of Branding Brand clients in various industries, including apparel, health and beauty and home goods.

Branding Brand’s platform powers mobile Web sites and apps of more than 200 retailers globally.

“For the first time, retailers are coming to Branding Brand post-launch, looking to optimize what they already have and tap into the collective knowledge over 200 retailers,” Mr. Rahimi said. “Optimizations, via A/B and multivariate testing is relatively new on desktop sites, which means it is completely foreign on mobile.

“Over the last few months, we’ve launched more than 1,000 optimizations on non-Branding Brand sites that guarantee increased conversion.”

Final Take
Caitlyn Bohannon is an editorial assistant on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York