72% of Consumers Expect Brands to Have Mobile-Friendly Sites

Consumers don’t like bad mobile sites, or even worse, brands not even having a mobile site.

While 72 percent of consumers think it’s important for brands to have a mobile-friendly site, fully 96 percent have nonetheless come across a site that wasn’t mobile-friendly, according to a Google study. That consumers are turned off by sites not optimized for smartphones isn’t news to anyone who uses the mobile Web. But marketers need more than anecdotal evidence to get their organizations to invest in the medium, said Google’s head of global mobile sales and strategy Jason Spero. First off, brands should keep in mind consumers’ mentality when visiting mobile sites. They’re “task-oriented,” said Spero. Sixty-six percent of the consumers surveyed said they navigate to mobile sites through a search engine, and 79 percent said they’ll double back to the search engine if the sites they click on aren’t to their liking. In fact, they’re five times more likely to abandon the search altogether if they don’t like what they find.