As more and more consumers use their mobile devices to access the internet, marketeers are working hard to understand the habits they are developing in this new media.

Now research firm GfK has released some preliminary numbers that give some insight on the mobile surfing habits.

GfK analyzed the mobile activity of over 200,000 mobile internet consumers in three European countries using GfK’s unique ‘Network Intelligence Solution’ (GfK NIS). This new research tool analyzes a mobile operator’s IP traffic to determine the mobile internet browsing behaviour of large numbers of individuals.

Also, the NIS tool measures all websites visited using mobile internet regardless of the device; mobile phones, Smartphones, PC tablets and 3G Cards are all monitored.

Time of day

According to GfK, mobile internet traffic begins to grow rapidly each morning about 5am, and reaches a peak at 4:30pm. “The usage differs considerably during the day and sometimes even within the same hour. For example, 7.45am can have up to 30-40% more traffic than 7.15am on the same day.”

What are they browsing?

GfK also revealed several other interesting bits of information about the browsing habits of these 200,000 consumers, including:

• the average smartphone user makes up to 24 web sites visits per day
• a vast majority of the sites visited are to traditional websites and not mobile specific sites
• the Top 50 websites constitute only about 40% of all visits

One site which stood out because of its popularity is Facebook. In every country that GfK measured, they reported that the popularity of Facebook is “consistently remarkable”. In fact, they identified a identify a group of mobile users where Facebook is almost the exclusive site visited.

“At GfK we call these ‘Facebookies’, and they currently account for between 10-15% of all users,” explained Fredrik Hallberg, Managing Director of GfK NIS.

GfK hopes that this level of detailed information will be valuable to the mobile community. “NIS allows us to provide both mobile operators and the media industry with relevant and reliable information, enabling them to fully monetize mobile traffic for the first time” continued Fredrik.