• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, April 15, 2019

For years, mobile visits to websites have been creeping up to surpass those on desktop, but in 2018 those visits reached 58%, according to recent data. The more interesting data comes from analyzing the industries that are taking the lead. 

Stone Temple released last week released the latest edition of its study on the state of the mobile web. "One clear thing, we did not see continued growth in mobile," said Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting. "Things may have stabilized a bit in mobile use in the U.S. vs. desktop."  

The update demonstrates changes in mobile web versus desktop in 2018. It also compares the latest data to use levels in 2016 and 2017. The stats were pulled from SimilarWeb and reflect U.S. traffic across the web.

In this year's study for 2018, the data shows a lower percentage of mobile traffic than Stone Temple saw in 2017. Enge said it could be due to a change in the data source used for analysis. 

Analysts looked at the data to identify the industries with the highest percentage of mobile users. The adult industry saw the highest number of mobile users at 84% for the third straight year, followed by gambling at 80%, people and society at 68%, pets and animals at 65%, and food and drink at 64%.

Of the 25 categories analyzed, shopping came in at No. 15 with 55%, followed by travel at No. 18 with 53%.

Games was another surprise, coming in at No. 21 on the list, with 47% of users coming to sites from mobile devices.

Arts and entertainment took the number one spot for the time on site, in terms of minutes, by industry with 7.89 minutes for mobile and 19.18 minutes for desktop. Home and garden saw the lowest time on site at 2.34 minutes on mobile and 3.48 for desktop.

Websites may gain more visitors from mobile devices, but overall time spent on websites by desktop devices still far surpasses mobile, at 11.52 minutes versus 5.95 minutes. Mobile devices made up 42% of total time spent online, and bounce rates came in at 50%.

Stone Temple saw a drop in the percentage of total page views from mobile devices versus desktop, but this number is still higher than in 2016.

In 2018, the total number of page views from mobile devices fell to 42.3%, down from 52.5% in 2017. Views on desktop rose to 57.7% in 2018, up from 47.5% in 2017. The results are based on 1 trillion visits in 2017, and based on 0.9 trillion visits in 2018.

Results for page views per visitor were a little different. The page views for mobile fell to 5.15 in 2018, compared with desktop at 9.84. In 2017, mobile saw 6.46 mobile average page views per visit, compared with 9.90 per visit on desktop.