For any marketer who hasn’t gotten the mobile-first memo, the recently released 2016 Internet Trend Report served as a definite wake up call. It covered the shift to a video-heavy and data-rich marketing world but really emphasised the fact that we are living in a mobile-first world.

While industry experts and companies like Facebook and Google begin conversations about design and user experience with a focus on the small screen, this hasn’t quite translated over to the wider marketing industry.

The $22 billion mobile advertising gap.

For marketers, the most important thing we learned from the 2016 Internet Trend Report was the fact that online advertising is growing – with mobile growing faster than desktop, even though it commands a smaller share of the pie.

The report also revealed that people spend 25% of their time looking at mobile devices, but marketers only spend 12% of their advertising budget on mobiles – that 13% gap represents a $22 billion missed opportunity in the US ad industry alone. By increasing the number of mobile ads, marketers have the potential to reach many more customers.

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Think of the online customer as a spoilt child – and that child doesn’t like waiting. A delay in delivering a mobile friendly website causes them havoc, rushing away as if you have the plague – all this happens because of a few schoolboy errors.

The digital generation has no patience for disappointment in user experience. They want it now, they want it their way. We’ve identified six issues that are particularly annoying for mobile users, and any one of these mistakes could drive visitors away from your site.

1. Your website simply fails to load

Even the giants of American marketing sometimes fall short in the most basic ways, by making sites that entirely fail to appear on mobile devices. Although visibility into the mobile UX can be challenging ‒ especially when you factor in the sheer number of mobile devices and the slowness and inaccuracy of many mobile testing tools, it’s no excuse for making a site that doesn’t work at all on mobiles.

Doritos recently had a high profile campaign designed to leverage the excitement surrounding the Batman vs. Superman movie – but it didn’t go to plan, as it did not work at all on mobiles. Can anything be sadder than pouring buckets of money into a high-profile campaign, only to have it not appear? All that money created irritation, not excitement.

Tip: Make sure your website displays on all market-leading phones or tablets!

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