There is new “cross device” research that Google has released that provides more evidence of a fact that seems obvious to a majority of us – a substantial number of consumers browse the web and search on multiple devices as the day goes on. It’s also been confirmed that mobile is the dominant platform, but the interesting part of this is that a meaningful percentage of users use mobile exclusively.
These findings are based on “behavioral measurement of a convenience sample of 11,964 opt-in Google users between January 1, 2016 and March 31, 2016.” The data were then “calibrated to reflect a U.S. demographic of 18 to 49-year-old cross-device users.”
Users are spending 170 minutes on their smartphones everyday, and in comparison, they’re using PCS for 120 minutes, and roughly 75 minutes on tablets. The most common physical locations that smartphones are used in this particular order:
1. Home
2. Work
3. Stores
4. Restaurants and Bars
The data of this study echoes another recent mobile usage study from Burke and Thrive Analytics. In that study, it was argued that smartphones are as much about at-home, top-of-the-funnel usage as they are near me, out-and-about-usage.
About 80 percent of users are using their smartphones on an average day, while about 67 are using their PCs. About 57 percent of those people are moving between devices and 21 percent are concurrent users on more than one device simultaneously.
As I said before, an interesting bit of data coming from this study is that 27 percent of folks are using solely smartphones on any given day. It’s reported ny Google that those people who are conducting searches on an average day, 39 percent search only on a smartphone, and 32 percent of them are searching only on a PC.
Google showcased year-over-year growth of mobile search by category:
These findings were released partly in support of Google’s recently announced cross-device retargeting capabilities. There’s more data in the full report (PDF).