Hearst Corp. has seen an increase in mobile page views for its publications, including Marie Claire, as it continues to roll out mobile initiatives for its titles.

Hearst launched the revamped Marie Claire mobile site on Feb. 17 in addition to its Cosmopolitan and Harper?s Bazaar brands and has seen an increase in mobile traffic across all sites. The publisher is also planning to roll out seven more revamped mobile sites in the next three months.

?Our focus today is to enable our audiences to consume our Web content from the most common devices ? smartphones, PCs and iPad tablets,? said Kimberly Lau, vice president of business development and partner relations at Hearst, New York.

?Our mobile sites were previously hosted by an external CMS and featured a small section of the content available on the Web site,? she said.

?As we rollout our new mobile sites, we are making a majority of the content available in a format that is optimized for the small screen.? 

Hearst claims that since rolling out the revamped Harper?s Bazaar mobile site ? http://www.harpersbazaar.com/_mobile/ ? mobile traffic has increased 50.62 percent over the past month.

Additionally, mobile traffic to Cosmopolitan?s mobile site has grown 30.5 percent since its relaunch.

All of the new mobile sites have a new swipable gallery at the top of the page and include more content than was previously available. The mobile sites also include a new function that expands across the page when tapped on to let users find information quickly.  

Hearst?s Good Housekeeping magazine was the first of the publisher?s sites to relaunch in September and is now seeing 19 percent of traffic coming in via mobile devices. This shows how mobile is increasingly being used to access news content and needs to be included by publishers in their overall digital strategies.

Hearst is no newbie to mobile and originally began rolling out mobile sites for its publications in 2007.

The publisher is also placing big bets on tablets, specifically the iPad, by rebuilding portions of its Web sites in HTML5 so that it loads quickly on tablets and is easy to read. 

In addition to mobile Web and tablets, Hearst has run mobile bar code initiatives for several of its publications recently.

For example, the publisher?s Esquire magazine recently used mobile bar codes to bring its February cover to life (see story). 

Digital editions are also a crucial part of the publisher?s strategy and Hearst works to promote apps inside its mobile sites as an additional platform for readers to access their favorite brands.

?We will continue to test targeting device specific opportunities, so our readers are aware of the various ways they can interact with our brands,? Ms. Lau said.