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