So I’ve been looking at Google Analytics reports for our clients for 2020 in comparison to 2019. There’s a sector – the Pennsylvania government websites – that, at least for us, exploded in usage in many cases in 2020. This is at the state and the local government level.
It’s not just that the usage doubled or more on so many of these sites. It’s also that 2020 was the year that mobile access became a dominant trend for many of these sites. There are still many of them that have majority desktop accesses. But a significant portion of them became majority mobile access – and this was the first time for that. Mobile has come home for Pennsylvania’s government web sites. There are a couple of reasons for this – one being that more and more, government websites also use social media, which generally drives mobile traffic. And no doubt there were callers that discovered that offices were closed and no one was answering the phone, and they then moved to email through their phone. Contact page traffic was way up. But Google still drove a lot of the mobile traffic as well. So did direct access, which most likely came from a link in an email.
So this is a bit of a game change for government entities. It had been coming for a while. It’s time to take a look at the mobile usage of static pages in particular, and decide if the mobile version needs a more prioritized front page or menu system. Or… specialized content, or packaging of that content, for mobile users. Mobile users are less likely to spend a LOT of time looking for things, so they should be pointed to their priority as quickly as possible.