The 5 Most Exciting Digital Marketing Statistics From the Last Weeks

Digital marketing is a notoriously fast-paced industry. In other fields, research from a year ago might still be cutting-edge, but that’s usually not the case here. In one day, out the other.

To help you stay on top of things, we’ve rounded up the most interesting and important statistics from this week. Read on to find out what’s changing in the world of digital marketing, and what it might mean for your campaign.

Programmatic advertising takes the field

Programmatic marketing has become the dominant model of digital display. According to this eMarketer report, by the end of 2016 70% of all digital display marketing in the UK will go through programmatic channels, and it will go as high as 80% in 2018. While some analysts believe the rise in programmatic is related to viewer frustration and increases in ad blocking, it’s hard to find a solid link.

Data from Integral Ad Science found only marginal differences in viewability and fraudulent ad impressions between programmatically traded ads and those traded directly with publishers. Looking broadly, it seems like the programmatic marketplace has simply reached maturity and players in it are enjoying greater confidence.

Facebook is now the leading traffic source

It’s been clear for a while that Facebook is taking over as a traffic source for online publishers. Fortune reported recently that Facebook now drives more traffic to news sites than Google, and it’s rapidly making the traditional website obsolete. Facebook now accounts for a staggering 14.2% of all traffic for major online publishers. That’s more than triple the rate in January 2014!

Keeping track of this traffic is a challenge. It calls for new analytics tools – Keyhole and AgoraPulse are a good place to start. Chartbeat also now has a social view that allows you to monitor traffic and conversations about your brand.

Facebook overestimated video view metrics for two years

Before we all prostrate to the social media giant, check out this report from the Wall Street Journal: it turns out that Facebook wildly overestimated average viewing time for video ads on its platform… for the last two years. Apparently their metric was artificially inflated because they only factored in views of over three seconds. This created a distortion of 60-80%. Facebook officials apologized and they’ve put out a new metric, but this definitely is not going over well with marketers.

Smartphones lead in paid search

As if the general rise in mobile wasn’t enough, smartphones have become the main channel for paid search clicks. iProspect research has found that mobile’s share of paid clicks increased by 20 percentage points since last year: up to 49% of all clicks. (Meanwhile, desktop has declined by 14%.)

Source: https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Smartphones-Take-Over-Paid-Search/1014512

Just as interesting is the latest findings on how users behave on mobile. Google discovered that 92% of users who search for a product on their phone make a purchase that same day. Out of those who search for something nearby, 76% visited a business that day.

Keep this in mind when optimizing your mobile campaigns. In an example given in this study, focusing on searches that include “near me” caused one company’s mobile traffic to triple and conversions to go up by 14%.

Instagram on the rise

Instagram is the channel of choice for forward-thinking marketers. Doubling the numbers over the past six months, their ad platform now has over 500,000 advertisers. COO Marne Levine sees the platform’s main opportunity for growth in small- and medium-sized businesses. It’s a natural direction, since many entrepreneurs report getting inspiration to start their companies from what they see on Instagram. Getting on Instagram is a good move for existing businesses too: 70% of campaigns on the platform generate significant increases in online sales, and Instagram ads boost offline sales by 2%.

Hear any exciting numbers we missed? Share in the comments below!