When the stakes are high, the way your website is designed can make you or cost you serious amounts of money. With an increased trend towards mobile searchers, and Google’s recent migration over towards a mobile first index, for websites making use of organic traffic as a marketing channel, it’s even more important to be mobile focused.

However not all purchases are made with one touch point, and so the transition from mobile to tablet / desktop needs to be tracked accurately to maintain conversion data, which is very difficult to do accurately.

The Keys to a Mobile First Design

When you’re doing research into mobile, the best place to start is on your phone. Visit other websites in your industry with the goal of making a conversion, and make some notes on what you liked, what made things easy, and what things made it difficult or put you off making a conversion. You can then use these notes to hone your own website landing pages, and help to increase the chances of conversions before you even publish your site.

One of the important things to note is that all phone screens are different widths, and so you can use various phones to test or an online tool that maps your website onto different widths, to make sure everything is going to work for all visitors.

Analysing Mobile Experience on Existing Websites

If you already have an active website and you want to know how users are currently engaging with it, you can use a custom Google Analytics report to segment your data and get to the bottom of it. Simply go to Audience -> Mobile -> Overview, then click on the edit button in the top right corner. Next, scroll down to the green box where it says “Device Category” and click “add dimension”. Click on “landing page” and then click save at the bottom of the page.

Now when you click mobile on the next screen, you will be able to see each of your landing pages mobile user experience data. From here you can work out high bounce rate pages that may have some UX issues on mobile for you to fix. This really helps to focus your efforts on the most important pages and problems to get sorted, and it will eventually increase your conversions and Google rankings.

Finance Specific Problems

In the finance industry specifically, such as the loans niche, there is a big focus on custom quotes in the UK, with many of the top websites like Money Supermarket and Money.co.uk providing custom quotes based upon user data. This throws up roadblocks when combined with the new EU GDPR regulations regarding storing customer data, as websites now have to add even more disclaimers onto submission forms in order to make them legal, but this also ends up reducing conversions as a result. The alternative is to go down the Money Saving Expert or Best Loans route, of comparing the average best deal without taking any personal information through the website itself.