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INDUSTRY REPORTS

Digital 2024 Global Overview recap

Released last week, this huge 561 page report summarises the “Essential data on digital behaviour around the world” for 2023.

Let’s jump into ecommerce and digital marketing specific insights. Or jump to the bottom for the takeaways. ⬇️

ECOMMERCE DRIVERS:

🚚 Free delivery remains by far the top driver to encourage completing an online purchase (p448)

💨 These top purchase drivers are similar for all age groups, but with next day delivery being a higher priority, the younger you are (p449)

📦 Having an easy returns policy is becoming more important, jumping from 4th in 2022 to 3rd place in 2023 (..Refundid joins the chat.. 👀) (p448)

🌐 Australia still has a lot of room for purchase growth online - 1.9% of its GDP is spent on ecommerce, vs 2.7% in US, 3.3% in UK, and a whopping 7.1% in China! (p451)

💸 For those who ARE spending online, it’s proportionally less in Australia - 2.6% vs 4.4% in UK / 3.4% in US based on Av Rev per User vs GDP per Capita (p453)

💳 Intriguing insight into a YoY double digit decline of both 2nd hand purchases (-17%) and Buy Now Pay Later (-13%) based on the survey data - no answers here (p438)

DIGITAL MARKETING:

📢 Brand discovery channels: Social media ads become the top source of brand discovery for 16-34, while search engines for remain top source for 35+ (p490)

🙅‍♂️ Ad Blockers: 32.5% of use ad blockers as part of their browsing, over-indexing in men. Why does this matter? Ad blockers not only prevent ads being shown, but also can block your Google Analytics scripts, meaning less accurate transaction data. See bottom for recommendations (p508)

😰 Biggest reasons for using Ad Blockers? Too many ads, ads getting in the way, and to protect privacy. No comparison data to see if consumer privacy has risen or dropped ranking here (p511)

🍪 Declining cookies - 35% decline cookies at least some of the time, rising slightly vs LY. This also implies that most of us still just press ‘accept all’ when we see those endless consent popups! (p512)

📈 Digital ad spend as a percentage of total ad spend moves from 50-70% in 5 years. No surprises here - what is your split of online to offline spend? (p517)

🤳 Influencer spend accelerates +17%, albeit from a smaller base (4% of total spend)

🖱️ Search CPC: rises +14% from $0.58 to $0.66 cost per click, showing the increasing challenge in profitably scaling with ads (p532)

🧑‍💻 Social CTR: 1% clickthrough rate, dipping from 1.2% the previous year. No CPC provided. - p537

TIME ONLINE AND BRAND RESEARCH:

😑 One of the top reasons for using social media? “Filling spare time”. We’re bored - let’s keep our brand videos entertaining! (p221)

📱 Daily time spent online using social media is now almost 2.5 hours. That’s 36% of our total online time (p225 and p229)

😮 TikTok leads the pack in time spent on app per month at 34 hours, jumping almost 50% vs the previous year’s report! (p238)

👀 Social networks jump significantly as a method of research about brands and products (p249)

SO WHAT ARE THE TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS?

1️⃣ Continue to invest heavily in ecommerce - lots of room for growth vs other countries (just look at China!)

2️⃣ Free shipping is a critical driver in helping to convert consumers - how can you reduce the this barrier while maintaining profitability?

3️⃣ Do you have a great return policy? Make sure it’s emphasised on site. Don’t have a good one? Your customers may be completing their purchase elsewhere.

4️⃣ Increase investment in social as it become a platform for both brand research and conversion across all age groups. This comes in a week where TikTok is trialling makes more posts shoppable, and Google starts including TikTok content in its results!

5️⃣ With increase use of ad blockers and consumers declining cookies, this makes it harder to track conversions and retarget effectively. Consider server side tracking solutions to help improve accuracy in Google Analytics, and improve your retargeting capabilities (Check out the Shopify x GA4 webinar for an explaination with solutions): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8hEGxFyGWo&t=1307s)

I’ll be covering off 4 other reports on LinkedIn over the coming week:

• KnoCommerce 44,000,000 post-purchase survey answers recapped

• Tatari DTC industry report recap from 275 DTC brands spending $500k+ on ads

• Salesforce State of Commerce with insights from 2,700 B2B and B2C commerce leaders

• Triple Whale’s Industry breakdown for $1m+ Shopify brands

You can keep track of all the future posts here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameskingprofile/recent-activity/all/

Other Marketing Analytics News

📩 1 in every 12 paid website visits from paid traffic across major marketing channels is invalid according to Lumio. The biggest culprit? LinkedIn. It’s a constant cat and mouse chase between bots and social platforms to keep genuine users clicking. Read more

📊 Remember that super easy GA4 report builder I shared last week? The creator Steve Lamar has now created a Chrome Extension to add back the '% of Total' in your GA4 reports like with the old UA 🙌 Read his post here 

Within Shopify’s recent Winter ‘24 Editions release was Audiences v2.2 (only available in US and Canada), which now introduces benchmarking that helps to compare performance vs similar stores and industries. No word on other countries yet. Read more here

🗓️ If you’re looking for fresh promo ideas for your 2024 roadmap check out this from Ilan Hurwitz, featuring 125+ events that you can easily filter by month, industry, and event type. View the calendar

🎧 Confused about attribution today? Supermetrics released a podcast episode this week on the difference between Multi-touch attribution (MTA) and Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM). Listen on Spotify