New analysis has revealed that the travel sector is seeing the biggest surge in traffic and sales via handheld devices, compared to desktop.
Further evidence has been unveiled that desktop devices are continuing to lag behind the growth of their handheld counterparts, as the trend of shopping online using mobiles and tablets strengthens year on year. The travel sector in particular has seen huge growth of mobile sales, doubling their figures year on year.
The team at affiliate marketing network affilinet analysed its year on year traffic across both retail, general online shopping, and travel, purchasing holidays and travel online.
The results revealed that the travel sector has seen the biggest surge in online browsing via handheld devices, from just 13 per cent of traffic coming from mobiles and 11 per cent from tablets in 2015 to 39 per cent on mobile and 17 per cent via tablets in 2016. This shows a startling 196 per cent increase in mobile traffic, and a 65 per cent lift in tablet use. To correspond, the desktop browsing suffered a substantial fall, from 74 per cent of traffic to travel sites using traditional computers to just 41 per cent.
By comparison, the retail sector also showed a decrease in consumer’s use of desktop computers year on year, falling from 63 per cent of traffic in 2015 to 58 per cent in 2016. While tablet also unexpectedly fell from 17 per cent to 15 per cent; mobile use was the predominant benefactor of this change, picking up from 17 per cent to 23 per cent.
Richard Greenwell, Head of Operations and Affiliate Development commented:
“This spike in traffic increase is not hugely surprising, especially when you see the IAB OPM study from last year reporting the average number of internet-enabled devices in a UK household at 8.3! With this being said, the percentage of actual sales on desktops within the travel sector still sits at 66%, which shows that whilst consumers are happy to research their holidays through a handheld device, the process of paying for one is still proving to be tricky.“