10 exciting digital marketing stats we’ve seen this week
- Updated on: 2017-09-23
- Read original article here
Ready for your stats roundup? It’s a good’un, I promise.
This week’s includes news about smartphone usage, in-store tech, mobile ad spend, and lots more. Be sure to check out the Internet Statistics Compendium for further facts (and a few fancy charts).
On we go.
New research by 4C suggests that media agency professionals are wasting the equivalent of two days per week performing admin, instead of focusing on creative and strategic tasks.
In a survey of over 200 professionals, 84% of respondents said that they feel concerned about the actual value their agency brings to brands, and whether they are truly offering them value for money.
The execution of social campaigns appears to be driving this concern, with 36% of respondents admitting that switching between platforms to manage campaigns is the biggest annoyance of their job. Some reportedly spend 17 hours per week doing this. Frustratingly, 63% said they believe the amount of time spent working on social campaigns will only increase over the next few years.
According to research by Greenlight, digital marketers are suffering from a worrying level of uncertainty.
It found that 36% of survey respondents don’t have confidence in their campaign targeting, while 18% don’t think their campaigns are reaching their desired audience at all.
Alongside this, it appears marketers are also unsure about where their marketing spend is actually going. One in ten marketers are not even sure which channels are the most valuable for their campaigns, and 17% are yet to commit their budgets accordingly. Even worse, 23% are failing to track campaign spend whatsoever.
In a study of VPN (virtual private network) usage around the world, GlobalWebIndex has found that 25% of internet users have used a VPN in the past month, and that 42% of these use a VPN daily.
When it comes to the motivation for doing so, 50% of people said that they use a VPN for better access to entertainment, 34% said better access to social networks or news services, and 31% said to maintain anonymity while browsing.
The study also found VPN usage to be lower in North America and Europe, with the top markets being Indonesia, India, and Turkey.
Following on from the launch of the new iPhone, a report by Worldpay has revealed that consumers are growing increasingly demanding of new payment technology.
In a survey of 2,500 consumers across the UK, 63% of respondents said they would like to be able to use a biometric scan to authorise payments in-store. 69% of consumers said they’d be open to using a finger to do so, while 24% said their face, and 33% said they’d be willing to use their eyes.
Worldpay also found that consumers expect speed and convenience in other areas. Click-and-collect is highly in-demand, as are automated payments and bots - 65% of consumers said they’d rather pay a robot than waste time flagging down a waiter in a restaurant.
According to Smaato, spend on mobile video ads increased by 142% in Q2 2017, making it the fastest-growing mobile ad format.
Rewarded video (full screen video ads that users can view in full in exchange for in-app rewards) was the fastest growing format, with spend increasing by 74%. In-app spending accounted for 94% of total mobile ad spending in Q2, compared with just 75% in 2016.
Finally, full-screen interstitials were the most popular ad format among advertisers, accounting for almost two thirds of total mobile video ad spending in Q2.
Mindshare’s UK retail trends report has revealed the growing demand for instant and 24-hour customer service.
Today, 60% of 25 to 34-year olds say that they find it easier to chat to brands via text message, online chat, or messenger apps. Meanwhile, 27% say they have used a chatbot in order to communicate with a brand.
The report also found that consumer’s attitude to data is somewhat conflicted. Despite the demand for personalisation, with 56% of people saying that brands should be doing more with their data, 65% say they are still very selective about the companies they share it with.
Verto Analytics has revealed that smartphones are now twice as popular than PC’s when it comes to accessing the internet.
When tracking which devices 5,000 UK adults used to go online, it found that smartphones accounted for 57% of people, while traditional PCs accounted for 27%, and tablets for 16%.
Smartphone usage was shown to peak during the morning, with this device accounting for 63% of the people online between 8am to 11am – three times as many people using a PC at that time. Meanwhile, desktop computers were found to have the largest audience share of 38% between the hours of 1am and 3am.
The latest ONS (Office for National Statistics) figures show that the average weekly UK online spend in August was £1.1bn - an increase of 15.6% compared with August 2016.
This means that the amount spent online accounted for a total of 16.4% of all retail spending for the month, excluding automotive fuel. This figure is also up compared to 15% in August last year.
Despite this year-on-year growth, Salmon has highlighted that shoppers have been predominantly spending on non-necessity and luxury goods and services, with the summer holidays and an increase in tourism contributing to this. As a result, Salmon predicts a dip in online spend as Autumn approaches.
Collective Bias has revealed that female influencers are uninterested in Snapchat, with zero survey respondents saying that it is the most important channel to them. In contrast, 28.4% of influencers said that Instagram is invaluable.
Perhaps surprisingly, Pinterest came second in the survey, with 26.4% of respondents saying that they favoured the platform the most.
Facebook and Twitter fared less well, but this is likely due to the less visual nature of the platforms as well as the subsequent lack of opportunity for sponsored, one-off posts.
The IPA Touchpoints report has revealed that adults are spending seven hours and 56 minutes a day consuming media – an increase of 9% from 2016 and 13% from 2005.
This means that adults spend just over two hours a day media multi-tasking (which means watching TV or using a laptop or smartphone while doing other things) – or nearly a quarter of that time spent consuming media in total.
In terms of medium, television or video remains the most popular, with adults viewing an average of four hours and 35 minutes per week. Meanwhile, out of home media accounts for three hours 28 minutes, and social networking or messaging accounts for two hours and 53 minutes.
