Taliani more and more "mobile": the use of smartphones to browse the web is growing

A new study conducted by the Mobile B2c Strategy Observatory at the Politecnico di Milano tells us that Italians are increasingly using their smartphone to surf the web.



The most recent data collected by the Observatory tell us that Italians who access the Internet every month from smartphones or tablets are 31.1 million. Of these, 37% use only mobile devices and never a PC or Mac.

The average time spent browsing from mobile accounts for 64% of the total spent online and is equal to about 45 hours per month, 88% of which is consumed within an app. The mobile advertising market was also very good, which in 2017 exceeded one billion euros and represents 40% of the digital market and 14% of total media.

In general, therefore, there are more than 11 million Italians who access the Internet exclusively from mobile, while the remaining part also uses a PC or Mac. Among other things, in March last year there was a historical exceeding of the number of users they only navigate from mobile devices compared to PC-only.

Returning to the advertising on mobile communication, in terms of formats continues to have a dominant weight (43% of the market) Display advertising (excluding videos). This is followed by the video advertising, which confirms once again the most growing format (+ 126%) and weighs 33% of the market, and the Search (+ 16%, which accounts for 20% of the total).

Very interesting is also the average number of apps published on the Stores by each company: about 5, a third of which are not updated. The average rating is moderate, equal to 3.35, slightly increasing if we consider the main and most updated ones. Who developed the app did it by targeting already known customers. For example, 93% of the app analyzed gives the user the possibility to access a personal area through login, even if more than half of them can use some services or contents in a free area. About 50% replicate in full (7%) or in part (40%) the site, over a quarter adds specific features or services, thanks to the peculiarities of Mobile (eg geolocation and camera) and finally 25% offers a service totally different. Even few give the ability to customize the homepage and less than half takes advantage of push notifications, most of which is sent in a non-personalized.

A growing trend concerns the biometrics solutions to support payments and user authentication in access to services: at the Italian level, Smartphones equipped with this technology are 46% of the total.

The users have instead proved to be cold on the relationship with the chatbots and on the possibility of communicating with the brands through Instant Messaging services like WhatsApp: only one in three would consider the possibility of dialoguing with a brand through a bot instead of a human and only 31% are interested in using chats to interact with brands.