You might have heard from industry experts in digital marketing that every business must have a mobile-friendly website. Agreed, right? But why it has a lower conversion rate than mobile apps? As the world is rapidly shifting towards mobile, it has become essential for every business to establish a mobile presence. Mobile app development is necessary as more than 53% of mobile traffic worldwide comes from mobile devices.
If you are a business owner, you might get confused about focusing on mobile apps vs websites. Choosing between both of them depends on several factors, including target audiences, budget, and intent.
Source: Medium.com
In the past few years, most businesses have realized the importance of having a mobile-friendly website. Sites that aren’t mobile-friendly can’t survive in this day and age. According to jmango360, mobile app vs website statistics
When it comes to comparing mobile apps and websites, both of them are compatible with smartphones, but mobile apps have higher conversion rates than mobile websites. There are different challenges associated with the mobile web that can be easily overcome by mobile app development. Let’s discuss the battle of mobile app vs. website in detail.
Why is mobile app development conversion rate better than a mobile website?
Mobile app development is not only making our lives more comfortable, but it also helps businesses to improve their conversion rates. Let’s discuss why mobile apps are becoming the medium for businesses to reach their target audience.
Source: InstantShift
1. Improve communication
The more you engage with your targeted audience, the more you can generate revenue for your business. When it comes to the battle: mobile app vs website , you can easily make people feel valuable by giving them a personalized touch with a well-designed mobile app with notifying them, in-app updates, and 24/7 customer support. You can also communicate with visitors to suggest products or services based on their interests, choices, and behavior, thus increasing the possibility of a conversion.
2. Availability of features
As mobile apps can be installed from Play Store or App Store, they give you access to specific user’s smartphones’ basic features. For example, you can use GPS, a Camera, contact lists, etc., to make your business app more engaging. Suppose a user wants to upload the bill of receipt to get cash back from your app, then the camera feature can be used to click the image.
In this way, users can upload any image with ease using mobile apps, and their chances of returning to your app increase. Mobile app development by leveraging the device features boosts the chances of visitors, subscribers, and users staying connected with your business.
3. Offline capabilities
The most significant comparison between mobile app vs website is that some app features can be accessed offline. For example, if you own a news agency and have a well-designed app for your users. Users will need an internet connection to access the news. With a mobile app, you can allow your users to read news offline after downloading it.
Depending on your business needs and how you set up your mobile app development, you can provide as much offline access to your users as you want.
4. User preferences
As we have mentioned earlier in the mobile app vs website statistics, mobile apps consume a significant percentage of internet usage. If we talk about mobile app vs website usage, users prefer to choose a mobile app rather than a mobile website.
To maximize conversion and increase your business outreach, you need to opt for mobile app development by launching an attractive mobile app for your business. People also use the mobile app as it takes only seconds to reach out to a brand.
5. Loading speed and time
In today’s modern world, if your website is slow, the user will move back to the other website, resulting in an increased bounce rate of your website. As compared to a mobile app vs website, a mobile app is faster than a mobile web. Higher conversion rates with mobile apps accompany lesser bounce rates and abandonment rates.
After comparing mobile app vs website
with statistics, we concluded that app stores and search engines are two immensely different online places, with various requirements, restrictions, and algorithms. That said, let’s discuss the possible differences in marketing strategy for a mobile app and a website is.
ASO vs SEO: how do they differ?
SEO is known as Search Engine Optimization, which increases the website’s visibility on Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). There are two types of SEO, namely on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is all about updating meta tags, title tags, meta descriptions, etc. Whereas, Off-page SEO practices link building, social networking, social bookmarking, commenting, and more.
Source: Medium.com
ASO stands for App Store Optimization. It is as same as SEO, but it focuses on ranking mobile apps on the app store. The essential thing to remember here is that you can’t use the same approach for both.
With ASO, you’re hampered by the restrictions of the various app stores. There are major differences in requirements between the two big runners, Apple App Store and Google Play. Each app name has a character limit, and screenshots must fit into given dimensions, etc.
Mobile app vs website: differences in the marketing strategy
As for the factors that affect both ASO and SEO, they differ too. Let’s discuss more the battle of mobile app vs website marketing strategy in detail.
Keywords play a crucial role in ranking a mobile app or a website. Nobody wants to read keyword-stuffed text that offers less value beyond every critical keyword. Anyway, this isn’t necessary for the App Store because it penalizes you for this, and it isn’t required on a web page because Google is smart and can understand what you are trying to convey.
One of the most significant differences between a mobile app vs website is that app stores only allow a limited number of characters for different metadata. App Store will enable subtitles of up to 30 characters, and Google Play allows up to 50 characters. This rigorously defines the number of keywords that can be used, primarily related to web pages where the limits are endless
The tools used for ASO and SEO keyword research may vary, the metrics used and the consequent evaluation methods are the same. To do keyword research for ASO, you can use AppTweak, whereas, for SEO, you can Ahrefs or SEMRush.
Mobile app vs website: differences between landing page
Creating an attractive landing page for both mobile app and website is essential, as the users land on the landing page, which should be relevant and informative. You want users to see the value in your app from the beginning.
A website landing page allows you to determine engagement points and minimize them to a chosen event, e.g., filling in a lead form, subscribing to a newsletter, downloading software, etc.
A/B Testing: mobile app vs website
The most important difference worth noting between A/B testing in Mobile app vs website is that for apps, you test the app page in the store, not the app itself. By distinction, websites are A/B examined themselves as users come directly to the site.
A/B testing for apps can be done on different platforms, but iOS doesn’t provide any A/B testing tools.
Best tips for A/B testing
- Test for the graphical and textual assets, like videos, screenshots, and USPs.
- Test different copies and designs against each other, but make sure there is only one change per variable so you can easily conclude what impacted the results.
- Analyze the results so that you can both implement the changes and build future tests based on them. Sometimes it requires tweaking concepts or combining the USP from one concept with the screenshots of another.
A/B testing for a website shows different web page variants to different web visitors simultaneously and tracking, which leads to more conversions. However, the end goal is to segment variables to decipher what performs best; doing so is different from that of app A/B tests.
Wrapping up
-
Organic ranking algorithms
In a website, the main ranking factor is the content. Whereas mobile app development, it’s about ratings, reviews, download velocity, and conversion rates on the app page.
-
Keyword research
Keyword research in ASO focuses on long-tail keywords, and at least 50% are branded keywords. You’re also subjected to far more restrictions in ASO as app names and subtitles have maximum character limits.
-
Mobile attribution
It is far more complex than web attribution as there are more disconnect times along the user journey.
-
Landing pages
For a website, landing pages have more freedom to determine the points of engagement, as opposed to app pages, where the engagement points are fixed.
-
A/B testing
A/B testing for the website has many more points of engagement to pick from. There’s no option for free testing for iOS, and if using the open platform Google Play Experiment’s for Android, it’s worth noting that it’s weak and provides few insights.
That said, it is clear about mobile app vs website statistics and usage that mobile apps can benefit a business a lot. Mobile apps outrank mobile sites in every category. More specifically, all of the differences and features we mentioned point to higher conversion rates.
