Late 2016 the tipping point will be reached, as digital spend outstrips TV advertising for the first time
If the forecasts based on current data from emarketer are correct, the US is about to spend more on digital ads that it does on to TV for the first time ever. This is the culmination of years of growth in digital advertising, but has been given a massive boost by the explosion of mobile ads over the last couple of years. From virtually nothing a few years ago, mobile advertising is in a renaissance. Now that over 50% of internet users are on mobile devices, it makes sense for budgets to be shifted to digital spending.
The data in this chart also points to other mega-trends, such as increased online video steaming rather than cable TV viewing, as well as increased time spent on social networking sites. These all combine to mean we…
The average marketing budget spends 48% on advertising, but how does it breakdown?
Not too long ago, broadcast and print reigned supreme, taking up a huge quantity of the advertising budgets. Then, along came the internet and began to shake things up.
The ability to accurately measure how adverts were performing was all too enticing and we have now seen a shift in favour of digital, with an average of 64% of the advertising spend.
Percolate, recently conducted a survey of over 300 enterprise U.S. CMOs, VPs, and Marketing Directors, to dig a little deeper into the hidden costs of marketing.
Search Ads
Search Advertising, refers to the adverts that appear on the results page, (usually near the top) when a user types a query into a search engine.
This takes on average 12% of the budget and can be…
Over a half a billion Smart Phones will be sold in Africa between now and 2020
Digital marketers by definition focus on areas where people are connected. The tech revolution started in the US, and quickly spread to Europe and then on to Asia. Now there are more smart phones, internet connections and ecommerce purchases made in Asia than any other region.
Unfortunately, Africa has frequently missed out on the potential of the digital revolution, and because of this it has remained a small market (in relative terms) for digital marketers, and hasn't received an awful lot of attention.
That should be starting to change. As the chart below shows, not only are phone shipments to Africa increasing considerably, to over 200 million units a year (that's the combined population of the UK, France and Germany!) but they are also becoming mostly Smartphones.
Smartphones ownership means internet access, ecommerce potential and social media use. Digital marketers should take…
When Parents and Grandparents started turning to Facebook, there was fear this would lead to a max exodus of the privacy conscious Millenials. Will this happen to Snapchat?
Well so far, so good. New data from eMarketer, has shown that Snapchat is getting more popular with the older demographics. Particularly from the ages of 25-34 and 35-44.
What's interesting is that this follows a very similar trajectory to that of Facebook - a rapid growth which started with the students and teens, before the slightly older generation of 25-34 and 35-44 year-olds began adopting it. Following from this, their Mums and Dad's, before finally a few Grandparents joined the party.
Although following a similar trajectory of Facebook isn't a bad thing; bearing in mind they have surpassed 1Billion users and are now valued at in excess of $330Billion, Snapchat still…
More clients think their agencies are innovative than ever before!
When it comes to digital marketing, innovation beats tried and tested. No one gets excited by banner ads, but a clever new Snapchat campaign or interactive billboard might just get some attention. So it stands to reason that clients would want and expect a good level of innovation with respect to digital initiatives from their marketing agencies.
A report from SoDA shows how many clients think their agencies really are innovative when it comes to digital. The numbers are looking fairly promosing, almost twice as many cleints thought their agencies were very innovative this year as did in 2015. More also thought they were 'somewhat' innovateive and less thought they were average.
So agencies had better keep up their efforts to become digital innovators, lest they fall behind the competition. If you're a marketing agency owner looking at offering new digital services, you'll…
European online advertising spend is growing 9.7% year on year. But who is spending the most?
IHS Inc. & IAB Europe have recently announced some interesting findings from its European Online Advertising Report, highlighting a sizeable increase in advertising spend, compared to this time last year.
One of the most notable statistics from the report is the difference in spend between the UK and the rest of Europe.
With the UK spending in excess of €11.8 billion on online advertising, almost double that of the nearest country in Germany and triple that of France.
Eleni Marouli, principal analyst at IHS Technology highlighted the disparity, stating how the UK is
"clearly the first stop for advertisers in the region and shows no signs of slowing down.”
He goes on to highlight how the top three markets account for the lion's share of the advertising spend…
Comparison of time spent with media against advertising investment shows a gap in the mobile market.
For many years IAB ad spend statistics showed that there was a gulf between the time consumers spend online, against Internet advertising investment to reach and persuade these consumers.
These latest stats comparing ad spend vs time spent in media for traditional and digital media shows that in 'digitally mature' markets such as the US, this is no longer the case.
We can see that the percent of Internet ad spend (23%) is now greater than time spent (22%). Yet if we drill down to look at the ever-increasing time spent using mobile devices to consume media a very different picture emerges with just 12% of Internet ad spend on mobile compared to 25% of Internet media consumption on…
Voice-related commands have risen 35x since launch of iPhone
The SEO industry exists because ranking highly in Google search is incredibly valuable. Google makes an incredible 70 billion from PPC each year, based on people paying to appear at the top of SERPs in AdWords. The whole industry is built around ranking for keywords which people search. Traditionally, these searches were made via keyboards, whether on a desktop or on a mobile device. But this is starting to change, with the rise of voice recognition assistants such as Google Voice Search, Siri or Cortana people are increasingly searching the web by just opening their mouth. This will inevitably have a massive impact on how people search and the way they structure the keywords which they use to access information. The chart below shows the rise of people using terms associated with voice-recognition commands.
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Digital budgets increase in 2016
Good news for digital marketers where they can make the business case for more investment in digital media and technology! Over half of digital marketing departments will see growing budgets this year. Some 55% of organisations will be either increasing both their digital budget along with the overall spend or shifting existing budget to digital, leaving digital with more to play with. Only 11% are decreasing digital budgets, and less than a third are just keeping it the same.
Provided you can prove ROI and justify digital spending, your budget should be fairly safe. The all important analytics will prove crucial here. Make sure to have data to hand to prove things like how much value your customer acquisition strategy is generating when you compare acquisition costs to customer lifetime value. If you're lucky you'll be in the half of digital marketers who see their budget increased…
Here is a breakdown of the most expensive keywords across some of the major industries.
Last year Google earned a staggering $67.39bn (97% of their revenue ) through their online pay-per-click advertising and with this set to increase this year, let's have a look at the keywords helping to reach this outrageous total.
Perhaps understandably, the most expensive keywords come from the legal sector. With some of the huge fees involved in certain cases, firms clearly see value in bidding serious money in the hope of landing their next prospective clients.
The highest cost per click on the list is "Best Mesothelioma Lawyer", which at $935.71 a click generates leads from Asbestos related incidents. This does seem an insane amount of money to fork out for a click, not even a guaranteed conversion, but considering the average mesothelioma settlement is usually in excess of…
