8 Important and Fun Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

The last several days were full of highlights from the realm of online marketing data. Here are eight stats that really stood out:

1. One year from now, digital will officially be king
Total digital ad spending will surpass TV for the first time in 2017, according to eMarketer’s quarterly forecast. Next year, the New York researcher said, spending on television spots will total a little more than $72 billion, or roughly 36 percent of total media budgets in the U.S. Meanwhile, online ad spending in 2017 will be about $77.4 billion, or approximately 38 percent of total ad spending, per eMarketer.

2. Pinterest opens up ads to all marketers
The social platform this week revealed that small and medium-sized businesses can now run ads on it like big brands have been doing for some time. Pinterest also reported that marketers that have spent at least $1 per day on advertising on the social platform see a 20 percent increase in clicks on their posts. 

3. People want robot friends, evidently
If you think robots are “so next decade,” guess again. Jibo, maker of a companion robot, said it has presold $4 million worth of its household bionic helper on its website—even though the product won’t be available until the end of the year. 

4. The Jetsons age is finally upon us
There are Jibo competitors hitting the market as well—Asia’s PaPeRo and Pepper, for instance, and Paris-based Buddy. Check out our SXSW-themed cover story about how robots are soon coming to a home near you. What’s more, ABI analysts project that companion robots will grow from a relatively miniscule sector in 2015 to a $46 million industry by the end of the decade and a $2.5 billion industry by 2025. 

5. IHOP gets personal about social targeting
The Glendale, Calif.-based company used personalized Promoted Tweets that included GIFs and users’ names in Twitter ads it ran through March 8, National Pancake Day. IHOP used the platform’s Tailored Audiences feature, targeting approximately 7.3 million users with such personalization, according to a rep for the company. To zero in on groups in such a personal way, the brand and agency MRM//McCann set up 37 custom audiences based on 20 popular names and their derivatives (e.g., Christopher or Chris). 

Christopher, celebrate #NATLPancakeDay w/ a FREE short stack & an invite for a friend! https://t.co/PABtlkznck pic.twitter.com/1fFQdOYTaz

— IHOP (@IHOP) March 1, 2016

6. KLM is flying high on Facebook Atlas
Facebook released new measurement tools for its Atlas ad server, including a path-to-digital-sales feature, which helped airline KLM uncover 24 percent more converted bookings.  

7. Hey, handy person, need a tape measure? There’s an app for that
Speaking of measurement, Hover quietly released a military-inspired app last year that’s designed to be a sort of digital tape measure (just to name one of its chief capabilities). The digital offering must work pretty well because word has gotten around—15,000 folks have downloaded the Hover 3-D Building Visualization and Measurements app in the last several months. Hover told Adweek it’s getting set to debut its first ad campaign in the coming weeks. 

8. Ball cap mocking the Donald is a hit 
The New York Times spelled “Drumpf” in his family’s native Germany.) All the credit goes to the cable channel’s John Oliver, who lambasted Trump on his show Last Week Tonight in late February in a bit that’s garnered 17 million YouTube views. 

8 Important and Fun Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

Here Are 12 Doggone Interesting Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

Thanks to the holidays, there are more digital marketing stats to delve into than usual. We’ve selected 12 of the most interesting numbers from the past seven days. 

1. The Engagement Lab studied digital advertising performances on Cyber Monday and found that the average conversion-to-sale rate was 0.16 percent. That’s a 184 percent increase over the previous before. Last year’s Cyber Monday conversion rate was 0.07 percent, representing a Sunday-to-Monday lift of 49 percent. More than anything, the raw conversion rates—well below even 1 percent—show how hard it is to create an online advertisement that actually gets viewers to click the buy button. 

2. That said, the percentage of lift compared to last year helps explain how Adobe found U.S. Cyber Monday orders totaled nearly $3.1 billion, a one-day Internet record and a 16 percent increase over the same day in 2014. The previous record was set last week on Black Friday, when $2.7 billion worth of goods was purchased.

3. Amazon scooped up 36 percent of all online sales on Cyber Monday, according to Slice Intelligence, an e-commerce data player. 

4. Amazon challenger Jet.com, which launched in July, reportedly brought in $2.7 million in sales on Monday. 

5. With so much noise on the Web, it’s getting more and more difficult to build social-media audiences, but at least one marketer has had a strong month when it comes to Facebook. From Nov. 9 through Dec. 1, toy brand Little Tikes grew its Facebook audience by more than 166,000 fans, according to Engagement Labs (not to be confused with the previously mentioned The Engagement Lab).

6. Pixability looked at the top 100 retailers, per the National Retailer Federation, to forecast YouTube ad spending among big merchants during the holidays. The Boston-based tech company prognosticates that YouTube’s skippable promos, called TrueView, will bring in $41 million this quarter for the Alphabet-owned video giant thanks to gift marketing.

7. Let’s move away from the holidays and into some stuff that’s not so cheery. Ad blocking is costing the digital publishing industry $781 million a year—yet it makes up only a small chunk of the $8.2 billion lost to other problems like bot traffic and content piracy, according to a report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

8. VTech’s current public-relations disaster is one of the scariest holiday marketing tales of all time. The toy seller is reeling after learning that hackers gained access to data for about 6.4 million profiles belonging to children. Read here what marketing experts believe the Hong Kong-based company should do now. 

9. Hey, maybe Google+ ain’t dead after all. On Nov. 26, GlobalWebIndex said one in every four Internet users utilize Google’s social platform at least once a month. 

10. And, maybe Facebook ain’t dead yet with the kids. Forrester Research found that while only 65 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds think the social platform is “cool,” it surprisingly reels more of them in than Snapchat, Instagram or Twitter. Sixty-one percent of tweens and teens said Facebook is the social net they get on most often, per Forrester. Additionally, 47 percent are visiting Facebook more this year than they did in 2014.

11. Few people have been as ubiquitous in the media as Donald Trump has been in recent months, and the front–runner for the Republican presidential nomination yesterday chatted with Periscope users for about 10 minutes. In terms of viewers for his virtual Q&A, Trump’s high-water mark for the livestream was nearly 7,500.

12. Last but not least, on Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan revealed that they plan to give away 99 percent of their Facebook shares over the course of their lifetimes. Zuckerberg’s estimated net worth is about $46.8 billion. The development came in conjunction with the announcement of the birth of their daughter, Max. 

Here Are 12 Doggone Interesting Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

8 Super-Fascinating Digital Marketing Stats Revealed at SMX East

SMX East took place last week in a smaller section of the overwhelmingly large Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. In my mind, New York City was the perfect place to host the world’s largest search engine marketing conference and expo, but I am a little biased, since 90% of my closest college friends reside in the city.

 

That’s me, kicking off the first session on ad copy tips with the brilliant Matt Van Wagner, Marty Weintraub and Brad Geddes!

With all the distractions that NYC has to offer, I still managed to pick up a backpack full of enlightening stats. Here are eight of the most game-changing stats to fuel your digital marketing efforts:

#1: 50% of Search Queries are 4 Words or Longer – Casie Gillette, Ko Marketing

That’s right! People are not just typing keywords into Google. Oftentimes marketers think solely about keyword optimization rather then what their customers are actually searching for. Casie Gillette, Director of Online Marketing at Ko Marketing, gracefully explained that the problem lies in marketers not communicating enough with their support team.

“Your support team is the direct line to your customers,” Gillette says. “They field the questions that aren’t on your website.” Casie also recommends using tools like Quora and Spice Works to identify and manage questions people are asking, then ask yourself if you’re answering these questions on your website. Are you optimizing these FAQs for paid search and SEO?

TAKEAWAY: Think in phrases and questions your customers are asking, not just keywords.

#2: You Lose 97% of Leads on Leaky Landing Pages – Larry Kim, WordStream

This next stat comes from WordStream founder, Larry Kim himself. As usual, Larry kept the audience chuckling throughout his presentation on conversion rate hacks, but when he shared this stat the audience was in awe. Seriously, 97%? That is a whole lot of leads to lose! It makes your traffic generation efforts seem useless if your visitors are just leaving, right?

Luckily, Larry shared a mind-blowingly effective hack to prevent you from losing leads on your multi-step landing page process, which is – drum-roll, please – call-only buttons! These newer features available on Facebook, Twitter, and Google AdWords cut out an entire step in the funnel where leads are likely to be lost – your landing pages. Rather than directing your leads to your website, they’ll instead be directed to you, the seller. This is hugely beneficial to businesses since phone calls are worth 3X more than website visitors.

 

TAKEAWAY: To keep leads engaged and push them down the funnel faster, push phone calls rather than website visits.

#3: Click-to-Call Commerce Will Reach $1 Trillion in 2015 and Double by 2019 – John Busby, Marchex

This stat supports Larry’s hack above, and goes to show that phone calls from the mobile SERPs are going to become more and more important as time goes on.

Just look at the graph below (I know it’s somewhat hard to see), but if you zoom in, you’ll notice that the majority of calls are predicted to be driven by search, over display, social, and even landing pages. This tells marketers that if they’re not optimizing for phone calls on the SERPs, they’re likely missing out on huge earnings in the future.

 

TAKEAWAY: Ensure that your search campaigns are pushing phone calls, and that you’re properly tracking these phone calls to understand the value they’re bringing to your business.

#4: It’s 2X as Hard to Get Your Ad Seen on the Mobile SERPs – Erin Sagin, WordStream

WordStream’s brilliant PPC Community Manager, Erin Sagin, took the stage to discuss how to convert the mobile visitor, and right of the bat audience members learned that if you suck at converting mobile traffic, you’re not alone. Major relief, right? But, why do we all suck at it?

The mobile landscape is a whole different playing field. As you can see in the graph below, ads are less likely to be shown even in positon 1! The solution? Bid up on mobile.

 

The problem, not all of us have the financial resources of Donald Trump.

 

So, what can be done? Erin suggests focusing on high purchase intent keywords such as long-tailed specific queries, purchase-type keywords like “buy” and “discount,” and emergency keywords. Take these high-intent words, put them in their own campaign, and bid up on mobile – it’s that simple.

TAKEAWAY: Don’t let poor mobile performance discourage you! Revamp your mobile strategy to bid up on the keywords with high-purchase intent and save your lower-intent keywords for desktop where you’re more likely to gain profitable visibility.

#5: More than 86% of Time on Your Phone is Spent Within an App – Samantha Yeh, Bitly

Bitly’s Product Marketing Manager, Samantha Yeh, took the stage revealing some really fascinating app statistics, which made me realize that marketers are focusing way too much time on optimizing for a mobile site when more time should be focused on marketing app downloads.

Once you can get a consumer to download your app, the chances of making them a returning buyer increase drastically. Think about it. If you get a user to utilize your app, you have a direct marketing channel to them, and the opportunity to build long-term customers and brand loyalists is sky-high. Samantha also shared that apps are supposed to drive $5.6 billion in revenue in 2015!

TAKEAWAY: Marketing your company’s app should be a higher priority than catering to the mobile web. Create a strategy to get more app traffic through Facebook App links, Twitter Cards, Google App Index, etc.

#6: 51% of People Want Location-Based Coupons When Searching – Aaron Levy, Elite SEM

Aaron enthusiastically discussed the different buckets that mobile searchers fall into including: bored, research, need, and desperate. Under the “need” bucket, he shared some interesting data from a case study of a client who introduced a mobile discount for an in-store purchase, reading “show this ad at checkout to receive discount,” and saw a 9916% lift in incremental mobile revenue – wowza!

 

TAKEAWAY: Use coupons and in-store deals on mobile to spur visits and conversions at your storefront.

#7: 72% of Consumers Who Did a Local Search Visited a Store within 5 Miles – Amy Bishop, Clix Marketing

This stat is pretty straightforward and not unbelievably shocking, but the high number shows that search is a critical part of a local businesses marketing strategy.

TAKEAWAY: If you’re a local storefront, you NEED to be advertising in geo-targeted radius on Google. Your shoppers expect to find you online before visiting your storefront.

#8: 43% of Consumers Do Research in the Store – Amy Bishop, Clix Marketing

This stat put me at ease that I’m not the only lunatic crouching down in the corner of Target reading product reviews on my iPhone before making a purchase, so thank you Amy!

TAKEAWAY: Consumers are more informed than ever before. Ensure your shoppers are able to find product reviews easily while on-the-go. If you’re in the retail space, ensure you have over 50 reviews on one of Google’s approved review aggregator sites so they show up within your ads. This could prevent a shopper from purchasing with a competitor.

 

About the Author:

Margot is a Content Marketing Specialist at WordStream with a background in PPC, SEM, content and digital marketing. Margot is passionate about writing and is also a regular contributor to Search Engine Journal and Social Media Today. Margot was recently named the 25^th Most Influential PPC Expert in 2015 by PPC Hero. She enjoys running, sleeping on the beach, and eating ice cream during her free time. Follow her on:

Twitter: @ChappyMargot

Google+: +Margot da Cunha

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/margotdacunha

8 Super-Fascinating Digital Marketing Stats Revealed at SMX East

Here Are 13 Hot Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

The past week was filled with unusually enticing digital marketing numbers—with an upcoming Hollywood epic taking online video by storm, e-commerce insights and branded buzz around body painting. Here are the 12 most interesting, data-driven developments we came across:

1. If critics’ reviews of The Revenant are as positive as the Internet’s early reaction, there will be little stopping the movie from becoming a box-office smash when it hits theaters on Christmas day. The western thriller has gotten nearly 16 million views in three days since 20th Century Fox posted its trailer on Facebook. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as 19th century American fur trapper Hugh Glass in the film, which is directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who won an Oscar earlier this year for Birdman.

2. Digitally savvy folks who have been looking for extramarital affairs may be a little more nervous than usual today. Hackers have obtained data for up to 40 million users of the dating platform AshleyMadison.com, according to a KrebsSecurity.com post and other reports. 

3. Retail marketers who are in love with Pinterest certainly shouldn’t ignore Facebook, which, per Adobe’s new research, offers the most valuable social commerce clicks out there. Facebook traffic referrals generate an average of 91 cents for each user sent to an e-commerce site. Surprisingly, that figure represents a 17 percent decline from last year. Pinterest’s referral value dropped the most—25 percent in a year—to the point that the average user is worth 51 cents to the retailer, down from 68 cents. Interestingly, Adobe also discovered that at Twitter, the value of a referred consumer actually rose 63 percent to 65 cents.

4. On the subject of retail, Amazon showed the relationship between online buzz and actual sales is sometimes hard to figure. The e-commerce giant’s Prime Day effort on July 15 drew the ire of countless Twitter users, with negative social media sentiment around its brand skyrocketing 241 percent, according to Amobee Brand Intelligence. But Amazon reps contend that product orders actually exceeded Black Friday 2014—the site sold 28,000 Rubbermaid sets, as just one example. So maybe there is no such thing as bad publicity. 

5. Wow. If you are a driver for UberX, Lyft or both—which is often the case—New York is the place to be. Gotham’s ride-sharing drivers make close to $30 an hour, according to research from SherpaShare, a company that drivers use to track their earnings. SherpaShare’s research found that the national average for January through May was $12.62 an hour. Austin, Texas, and San Francisco were the second and third most-profitable places for UberX and Lyft drivers, but those cities paled in comparison to New York. You can read Fast Company’s big take on the data here. 

6. According to Fortune, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki sounded confident about the topic of increasing online video competition from Facebook and Snapchat, as she spoke at the magazine’s tech conference last week. Three days later, her parent company Google released its earnings, which revealed that YouTube’s top advertisers increased their spending by 60 percent in the second quarter. Google’s overall revenue report beat Wall Street’s expectations and sent its market value soaring $65 billion the following day. That is not a typo—$65 billion in a matter of hours. The Mountain View, Calif., tech giant’s share price also jumped more than 16 percent. 

7. The Boston Consulting Group last week released research after studying 25 digital publishers, broadcasters, e-commerce companies and Web portals based in North America, Europe or the Middle East. One of the more interesting takeaways: Condé Nast U.K., in its first year of programmatic ad sales, discovered that 60 percent of its top 50 advertisers that buy through its automated platforms were entirely new customers.

8. Tech vendor Undertone conducted an online survey of 3,600 U.S. adults ages 18 to 64 to suss out differences between desktop and mobile in terms of ad recall. When people were asked if they remembered seeing full-page ads, 38 percent recalled seeing the ad on a desktop. Forty-three percent of those who were served the ad on smartphones, tablets and desktops remembered the ad.

9. Online ad viewability continues to concern marketers, and Trion Interactive’s pitch is that it can help significantly. It teams with publishers like Gannett, McClatchy and Answers.com to run video ads for brands, and the vendor boasts an 82 percent in-view rate for the digital spots it delivers for brands like McDonald’s, Verizon and Amazon.

10. Unless the Winter or Summer Games are going on, Olympic sports don’t normally generate huge buzz online—but they are far bigger in the digital realm than you probably realize. Take FloSports, which covers everything from track and gymnastics to Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The Austin, Texas-based online media company told Adweek that its site traffic from January to May totaled 12.8 million unique visitors and 194 million page views, while video views reached 13.3 million. Read more to learn why New Balance, Gatorade and the dairy organization MilkPEP are buying up FloSports’ sponsorships. 

11. Periscope has generated three times as much traffic as livestreaming rival app Meerkat since its launch in late March, according to Adobe’s aforementioned research.

12. Can digital calendars put butts in seats? Stanza, which offers that very kind of service, revealed that 10,000 people subscribe to the New York Knicks’ Stanza calendar. The tech company said 56 percent of the subscribers last season clicked on ticket links. Although, it’s unclear how many people actually bought seats. 

13. Nestlé’s Coffee-Mate Natural Bliss all-digital campaign runs through September and centers on a risqué video. The brand took over an Irving Farm Coffee Roasters store in New York on April 24 with baristas wearing nothing but body paint, and it released the resulting ad on July 15. Less than a week later, the clip has attracted 3 million YouTube and Facebook views. Read our exclusive report on Nestlé’s initiative here, and check out the video below.  

Here Are 13 Hot Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

Here Are 10 Intriguing Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

The Women’s World Cup recently dominated digital and real-life discussions, as the U.S. women thrilled fans, winning the title Sunday and bringing home the World Cup trophy. So, our top 10 data points from the last week include a healthy dose of soccer-related stats. But, we are compelled to lead with a number that helps sum up the unusual story surrounding Reddit in the last few days.

1. More than 203,000 people have signed a Change.org petition to get Reddit CEO Ellen Pao to step down after controversy erupted last week about the firing of the website’s wildly popular director of talent, Victoria Taylor. The site has been in disarray for close to a week, with hundreds of subreddits being closed off from the public. Yesterday, Pao issued an apology, but it’s unclear whether her statements will make the problem go away.

2. According to Amobee Brand Intelligence’s comparative data, Nike’s sponsorship of the U.S. Women’s national team resulted in its being 121 percent more associated with the Women’s World Cup than tournament sponsor, Adidas, in content across 600,000 Web, mobile and social-media sites. 

3. With the scandals surrounding FIFA president Sepp Blatter, the soccer organization’s brand received a much-needed boost of positivity during the World Cup. There were 9 billion tweet-based impressions around the FIFA Women’s World Cup, according to Twitter. 

4. What’s more, FIFA’s YouTube channel absolutely smashed its all-time monthly views record during the women’s tournament in June, drawing 28 million views versus the 19 million it got in the same month a year ago—during the men’s FIFA World Cup. 

5. IBM got 1,000 sales and marketing staffers to promote its products and services on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook and has achieved huge results. In one example, the company told Adweek, it launched a business-to-business appeal called #NewWayToWork, which accrued 120 million digital impressions and drove 141,000 clicks to campaign content thanks largely to the employees sharing content through Dynamic Signal’s VoiceStorm software. 

6. A whopping 26 percent of millennials fake birthdays to get better deals online. Actually, that’s the kind of thing what makes the Internet awesome, right? Mindshare North America’s retail arm, Shop+, analyzed more than 1,000 responses to understand how 18- to 34-year-olds shop to suss out that data point.

7. Also, Shop+ learned Gen Y folks don’t stop there with their frugally-minded tactics. Thirty-six percent of them—compared with 24 percent of all adults—share an Amazon Prime account, which costs $99 a year, to receive free shipping.

8. YP has quietly become an effective player in the mobile-search market. For instance, Google controls 46 percent of mobile-search money, followed by Microsoft (Bing) with 11.3 percent. Twitter and Yahoo combine to own 17.8 percent of the market. All other search players combined make up the remaining 17.7 percent. What’s YP’s take? It gets 7.2 percent of the market, which is nothing to sneeze at if you are the old phone-book brand. (Read our feature on YP’s growing digital-ad business here.)

9. In the few days after the Supreme Court ruled that marriage equality was the law of the land, Facebook said 26 million people changed their profile picture and used the social platform’s rainbow filter to show their support for the LGBT community. 

10. According to a Yahoo study that surveyed 620 fathers, 50 percent of dads feel like ads rarely target them. These guys must not ever visit Zappos or other shoe retailers if that’s the case (#retargetinggonemad). 

Bonus stat: BuzzFeed created an entertaining video in which real Italian grandmothers try Olive Garden for the first time. The digital-media company published it on YouTube on July 3, and it’s gotten 1.2 million views so far and seems to be picking up speed. Somewhat surprisingly, a couple of the grandmothers go easy on the restaurant chain. Check it out below:

Here Are 10 Intriguing Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week