Very.co.uk tops IAB m-commerce report

Shop Direct’s Very brand has topped the Internet Advertising Bureau UK’s mobile user experience survey, after impressing with their mobile optimised site.

The IAB reveals that 94 percent of the top UK advertisers have a mobile optimised site, designed specifically with a mobile user experience in mind, with the top ten dominated by retailers, including Very.co.uk, Tesco, Amazon, Argos, Morrisons and Asda.

The study ranked the websites of the UK's top 50 advertisers by media spend, rating them by: pageload times; how website copy is tailored for a mobile screen; search functionality, and use of mobile-specific features such as GPS.

The audit revealed that 46 percent of the top 50 have a responsive design website, a single website designed to optimise on desktop, tablet and mobile screens, while 48 percent have a separate mobile-optimised version of their website, including 8 of the top 10 advertiser sites. The trade body states that brands with a mobile-optimised website scored better than those opting for a responsive design website across a number of measures.

"Whilst responsive web design is a great solution to building across desktop, mobile, and tablet these findings highlight the need for advertisers that have taken this approach to think differently about the content they serve on mobile and ensure it meets the high expectations of the tech savvy UK consumer,” said the IAB.

IAB states that 94 percent of the top UK advertisers have mobile optimised sites

IAB mobile manager, Mike Reynolds, added: “It's great to see that 94 percent of the top advertisers in the UK have an optimised site which reflects where people are choosing to spend their connected time. It was interesting to see that separate mobile sites scored higher against the user experience measures we looked at.

“This highlights the need for those advertisers approaching mobile with responsive web design to think differently about the content they serve on mobile devices, and pull in the unique functionality that makes mobile such an engaging device.”

Very.co.uk was 17 points ahead of the market average in the study, which the trade body claims was the reason behind 61 percent of the retailers total media spend now being invested in mobile, as mobile sales now accounts for 59 percent of its total online sales.

Commenting on the his brand's mobile efforts, Shop Direct's head of user experience, Sam Barton said: “For Shop Direct, designing for mobile is about creating fast and efficient cross device experiences, and driving improvements though our ‘Experimentation' strategy to learn more and faster through A/B experiments.

“We also moved our mobile research, design and development teams in-house to foster creativity, innovation and collaboration and invested in technology which enables quicker build of mobile experiments, where in some regards best practices are still being established."

Image: Very.co.uk mobile site