• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, May 3, 2013

From within our own mobile marketing bubble it may be hard to believe there are companies that are still outside and haven’t yet gotten that old-time mobile religion. But according to Adobe’s latest report surveying over 1800 marketers worldwide, 45% say that they have neither a mobile-optimized Web site or mobile application. This rather remarkable laggard index comes even when Adobe also saw a doubling of traffic from mobile devices to the broad sample of sites that it observes.

Of course, the glass is slightly more than half full when it comes to mobile. Twenty-seven percent of the marketers surveyed say they have a mobile-optimized Web site, and 7% are using applications as the main mobile presence for their business, while 21% are using both. In benchmarking the actual performance of this investment, however, 41% of marketers say their conversion rate from mobile is less than .5%. Sixteen percent are seeing conversion rates of .5% to 2.9%, 18% say they get conversions with a 1% to 1.9% rate, and 16% convert at 2% to 4.9%. Only 4% of companies with mobile presence say that their conversion is between 5% and 8.9%, while 5% are seeing conversions of 9% and above.

Adobe says that while 7% of companies are showing a conversion rate below 1%, those companies that are investing in mobile-optimized sites are three times more likely to see mobile conversion rates of 5% or above than those who are using only desktop sites.

Curiously, marketers’ opinions about what drives higher mobile conversions seem to be more susceptible to focusing on bright shiny objects than one would hope. For instance, when asked how effective various mobile tactics are in driving conversions, check-in rewards rose to the top, with 40% of marketers citing them as very effective and 40% rating the tactic as somewhat effective.

Strangely, to my mind, the least effective tactic cited in the survey was a mobile-optimized Web site, with only 24% saying it was very effective. Things like ad promotions, barcoded coupons, and social sharing all rated higher than simply making the mobile experience more fluid and convenient to the user by optimizing against their usage.

All of this seems to suggest that more people than you imagined are still ignoring the mobile migration. But even those companies that believe they are paying attention to this emerging channel may not be paying close enough attention after they check that mobile box.