Through the lens of boat searches on the Boat Trader website, we’ve tracked the trend toward increased use of mobile devices periodically in this DataTracker series. This month we look at the past three years of data and see the steady increase in smartphone use.
Since the second quarter of 2013, visitors on smartphones have nearly doubled as a percentage of site visitors, rising from 20 percent to 39 percent. Visitors on tablets have been very consistent at 16 to 19 percent; the drop-off has come in visits via desktop and laptop computers.
Seasonally the high-water mark for smartphone use is the third quarter, when visitors are apparently away from their desktops, more likely to be enjoying the summer outdoors and taking advantage of their mobile devices to keep shopping for boats.
The number of monthly unique visitors to Boat Trader’s site has increased incrementally during the three-year period. One drop in traffic was recorded during the second quarter of 2015, when the site went through a significant redesign to be, among other things, more responsive to the small screen size of mobile devices.
This article originally appeared in the June 2016 issue.
