Tablets Now Taking A Greater Global Share Of Web Page Views Than Smartphones, According To Adobe’s Digital Index

The proportion of web traffic coming from tablets has pushed past smartphones for the first time, according to Adobe’s latest Digital Index which has tracked more than 100 bil­lion vis­its to 1,000+ web­sites worldwide, between June 2007 to date, to compare which device types are driving the most page views. The monitored markets are the  U.K, U.S., China, Canada, Australia, Japan, France and Germany. While the difference between smartphone and tablet traffic is marginal — with tablets accounting for eight per cent of the measured page views and smartphones seven per cent — the growth in tablet page views is impressive, especially considering how new the category is (the first iPad launched in April 2010).

Of course both mobile device types still account for a fraction of the total share of page views when compared to desktops/laptops — which accounted for 84 per cent of the page views, according to Adobe’s data — but both are taking a growing share, and tablet growth is on an especially steep trajectory:

adobe web traffic to tablets vs smartphones

Adobe attributes the rise of tablet page views to how well-suited the form factor is for web browsing, with the most obvious attribute being tablets’ larger screen size vs smartphones (albeit, that gap is closing as some tablets shrink and some smartphones swell). On average, Adobe found that Inter­net users view 70 per cent more pages per visit when brows­ing with a tablet com­pared to a smartphone — so tablet users are doing more leisurely (and presumably leisure time) browsing.

While there is a good spread of different activities across both tablets and smartphones, Adobe’s index indicates that online shopping is a particularly popular activity for tablet users. Retail web­sites receive the high­est share of tablet traf­fic across all indus­tries, according to its data, while auto­mo­tive and travel shop­ping websites also get a “sig­nif­i­cant share” of tablet traffic:

adobe digital index tablets

Writing on its digital index blog, Adobe adds:

We’ve been keep­ing a close eye on how quickly tablets have taken off. Just ayear ago in Jan­u­ary we uncov­ered that vis­i­tors using tablets spend 54% more per online order than their coun­ter­parts on smart­phones, and 19% more than desktop/laptop users. Dur­ing the past hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son we saw that 13.5% of all online sales were trans­acted via tablets. And last month before the Super Bowlwe learned that online view­er­ship via tablets dou­bles dur­ing big sport­ing events. Now we know that not only is tablet traf­fic more valu­able in terms of ecom­merce and engage­ment, tablets have also become the pri­mary device for mobile browsing.

The U.K. leads Adobe’s Index for tablet page views, with the U.S. second:

adobe digital index tablet web traffic

All coun­tries tracked saw their share of traf­fic from tablets dou­ble over the course of 2012 — a trend Adobe expects to con­tinue through 2013. It added that some slight dips in tablet share in certain countries in November were down to PC traffic surging, rather than tablet page views dropping:

adobe digital index