Guest Post: Use of apps trumps mobile web around London 2012 Games

by Jenna Berger, research manager for global digital analytics, Nielsen

We learned recently that 28 per cent of mobile users around the globe admitted to watching video on their mobile device daily, so when the Olympics came about we wanted to take a look how UK residents were engaging with their mobile phones during London 2012 events. In preparation for the events, London 2012 launched two official mobile apps and one mobile game here, all available in the iTunes App Store and the Android Marketplace. The first app, called Join In, was promoted as a planning tool and the “essential companion” as a viewer’s go-to for information on the games.The second app, called Results, featured live updates on results and medals, as well as athlete profiles.

Positioned as a real-time tracker, the Results app allowed users to set alerts and push notifications to ping them when a particular event began.

So were these apps used during the Olympics? Or did people use the London 2012 mobile site instead?

Nielsen has a nationally representative electronic mobile measurement panel in the UK of more than 1,400 smartphone panellists.

We took a look at our panellists to learn how people were interacting with London 2012′s mobile properties.

Our measurement period began the week of July 23rd 2012 and extended to the end of the Olympics closing on August 12th [2012].

Of all London 2012 mobile page views that took place, 80 per cent can be attributed to apps.
That number jumps significantly when we look at time spent, where 96 per cent of all time spent using a London 2012 mobile property happened in-app.

Looking at a trend over the three week period (we included the week prior to the Olympics opening ceremony to capture some of the torch engagement as well as activity taking place in anticipation of the events), we learned that both the ‘time spent’, as well as the number of people utilising the London 2012 mobile properties, peaked in the first week of the Olympics.

We still see strong numbers in the second half of the Olympics games, but we observed a slight drop off in usage.

We see that the average time spent in app, per person, jumps from 10 minutes per person/week to 21 minutes per person/week during the first week of the Olympics.

However, our mobile web data shows that, while there was an increase in events per person, the overall time spent actually stayed the same at one minute per person/week.

Finally, we took a look at how usage of the two official London 2012 apps compared with each other.

We found that the Results app took the majority share of both ‘audience’ and ‘time spent’, and observed a steady decline in usage of the Join In app, which may have lost some of its audience and share to the Results app once the Games kicked off.

Overall, we measured high engagement with the official London 2012 properties, and found that apps were the primary way that people stayed current with the games on their mobile devices.

Author biog

Jenna Berger is currently research manager for global digital analytics with audience research specialist, Nielsen.