Marketing Digest

MTV Site Redesign Boosts Mobile Visits and Social Referrals

Report: MTV Increases Mobile Visits & Social Referrals after Site Redesign

With people becoming ever more accustomed to multi-device browsing, paramount importance is being placed on responsive web design (RWD). Whether it’s SMBs or large business corporations, businesses that fail to implement responsive web design across all of their web properties will experience traffic loss and dwindling user engagement. Once RWD is implemented, however, the returns can sometimes be exceptional.

One such case is MTV’s redesign of its web properties. According to a report by Google Product Manager, Luke Wroblewski, the popular music channel revamped its show pages and news site using responsive web design techniques, resulting in boosted metrics and a “tremendous impact on mobile engagement.”

According to Wroblewski, the redesign of MTV’s show pages saw 92% more mobile visits, 55% more mobile page views/visits, and a whopping 297% more mobile time spent/visits. MTV’s show pages also experienced an 11% decrease in exit rates across all devices and a 246% increase in social referrals.

Wroblewski noted that when broken down per device, tablets and desktops had more similarities in user behavior than mobile and tablet did. Considering that MTV streams full episodes of its shows, it makes sense that many users would prefer to stream episodes via devices with much bigger screens.

Meanwhile, MTV’s mobile news site saw improved metrics thanks to the redesign. Post-redesign, Wroblewski reported that MTV news had an astounding 565% increase in social referrals, 151% increase in site visits, and 137% increase in time spent on site. He credited the site’s strong numbers to MTV’s average users checking their phone “150x per day and a large portion of time spent…on their social feeds.” He also commends the redesign as a way of morphing “[MTV’s] editorial products from a search to a social centered experience.”

Back in November 2014, the Google team announced that they would be including a “mobile-friendly” label on search results to let users know if sites would display properly on their smartphones or tablets. With Google penalizing sites that give a bad experience to users and a ranking boost to those that provide excellent site experience, it would be wise for companies to implement proper RWD across their web properties if they want to maintain healthy metrics.

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