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Digital marketing is an ever-changing industry.
There are constantly new-
But with so many different channels…
How do you know what will work best for you?
I have compiled a list of over 150+ digital marketing statistics to help you see how others are leveraging digital marketing for their own businesses today.
These digital marketing statistics provide a good overview of what’s working in the industry right now as well as how digital marketing will evolve in the future.
Let’s jump in!
What Will I Learn?
If you don’t remember any other digital marketing statistics…
These are the ones you need to know:
Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimising your website so that it ranks higher in the Google search results.
SEO produces one of the highest ROIs of any marketing activity you can do. But the SEO industry is dominated by one search engine – Google.
Google has the highest market share with 81.95% of all searches coming through Google. Bing has 10.51% and Yahoo just 2.67%.
| Search Engine | Share (%) |
|---|---|
| 81.95% | |
| Bing | 10.51% |
| Yahoo | 2.67% |
| YANDEX | 2.42% |
| DuckDuckGo | 0.69% |
| Baidu | 0.53% |
There is no doubt that Google is more popular than any other search engine.
The only places you really want to rank on Google are in the top 3 positions of a search result – ideally number one.
Here’s why:
The number #1 ranked website in the Google search results gets an average click-thru rate of 31.73%.
This statistic was verified from a study of over 5 million searches.
In other words, 31.73% of all searchers click on the first Google result.
These are what the other search rankings positions get:
| Ranking Position | Distribution |
|---|---|
| 1 | 31.73% |
| 2 | 24.71% |
| 3 | 18.66% |
| 4 | 13.60% |
| 5 | 9.51% |
| 6 | 6.23% |
| 7 | 4.15% |
| 8 | 3.12% |
| 9 | 2.97% |
| 10 | 3.09% |
Over 75% of all searchers only click on the first 3 search results.
The bottom 7 results end up fighting out for less than 25% of organic traffic.
What’s more?
The first ranking position in the Google search results is 3.8x more likely to get backlinks than the sites in positions 2-10.
The ultimate link-building strategy is creating great content that ranks in the #1 spot!
How much traffic will get if you don’t rank on the first page of Google?
Short answer – nothing.
Less than 1% of online users click on the second page of Google. The truth is you won’t get much visibility if you’re not on the first page.
But getting any organic search traffic is a rarity for most websites.
90.63% of websites get no organic search traffic from Google within the first year. Only 0.21% of websites get over 1001+ organic visits per month.
If your website gets more than 1001+ organic traffic each month, you are in the top 0.21% of all websites online.
You can clearly see how valuable it is to rank on search engines like Google. This also means it’s really competitive.
Small businesses spent $26.87 billion on SEO in 2020.
This might seem like a lot of money but the average SEO campaign generates an ROI of 275%. For every $1 you spend on SEO you can expect $2.75 back.
That’s a very good return.
If you know anything about SEO you’ll know that content is a very important aspect of a solid SEO campaign.
And educational content is what generates the best results.
B2B blogs with educational content get 52% more organic traffic than B2B blogs with company-focused content. Educating your customers is a powerful aspect of SEO.
Want to build more backlinks?
Spend time creating long-form content.
Long-form content gets 77.2% more links than short articles.
The truth is that people want to link to content that provides in-depth information and covers topics comprehensively.
Good keyword research forms the foundation of an SEO campaign.
40% of all Google searches are only two keywords. These are high-traffic keywords but are also really competitive.
People also use Google to get their questions answered.
14.1% of all searches are in the form of questions. Answering popular questions about your niche in your content is a great strategy to generate more organic traffic.
SERP features are also becoming an important part of SEO.
A SERP feature is extra information that Google provides in the search results without you needing to click on a website.
This can include:
Only 2.4% of all Google search results DON’T have some form of SERP feature. That means about 98 out of 100 searches WILL have a SERP feature.
More SERP features = More traffic.
When creating your SEO content think about implementing optimisations such as FAQ schema that will help you get more SERP features.
What do these digital marketing statistics about SEO tell us?
These are the big takeaways to remember:
Need help with your SEO?
Get my own SEO team working on your website at Search Logistics.
Mobile has become the main way to access online content.
Mobile devices now account for 55% of the global market share of online access with desktops coming in second place at 43%.
Creating anything online should now be optimised for mobile devices first.
In fact, 25% of all internet users access the internet solely on a mobile device.
59% of online shoppers say that being able to buy on a mobile device is very important when deciding where to buy. If you run an online business, having a mobile-optimised experience is now a must.
The truth is that mobile isn’t going to stop anytime soon. About half (50%) of all website traffic globally is generated on mobile.
Here’s the problem:
On average, companies only spend 18.5% of their digital marketing budget on mobile.
If you just optimise marketing for desktop devices, you are neglecting at least 50% of online traffic – possibly even more.
And it’s not going to slow down…
Consumers spend about 4.2 hours per day on mobile devices. This was a 20% increase from last year.
Mobile ecommerce (also called m-commerce) increased by more than 30% worldwide throughout 2020.
The interesting thing about these digital marketing statistics is that mobile grew throughout the COVID-19 pandemic even though most people were at home where desktop devices were more accessible.
Business communications apps are also growing at a rapid pace. The use of these types of apps grew by 275% in 2020.
This was definitely due to the pandemic.
But business communication apps could be the bridge between B2B and B2C consumer habits. In other words, these types of mobile apps will become very powerful marketing tools in the future.
There’s only one downside to mobile marketing.
77% of mobile internet users said that they found targeted mobile ads annoying rather than helpful. Creating great ads that don’t impact user experience and still drive results will be a challenge for all digital marketers in the future.
Social media might be the fastest-changing digital marketing niche.
Why?
Our attention spans are getting shorter and there are more social media competitors popping up every day.
Every platform is now fighting for your attention.
When it comes to marketing your business, knowing which platforms to advertise on is a skill in and of itself.
These are some important social media marketing statistics to keep in mind.
The average marketer publishes an organic post on social media 3 to 4 times per week.
The 3 main goals that marketers have on social media are:
As organic reach has been limited on lots of social media platforms over time, it has proved to be a real art in using social media effectively.
84.13% of business social media accounts are managed by the owners of the business.
Finding great social media managers who can create authentic relationships with customers online is a challenge.
Business owners would rather take that challenge on themselves.
And it’s worth it. More than half the world is now active on social media and the average user spends 2 hours per day.
What’s more?
75% of marketers say that their social media marketing efforts lead to increased traffic.
97% of people who buy products online have used social media at least once in the last month.
The bottom line is this…
People use social media a lot and social media advertising works.
The pandemic also had a significant impact on social media use.
Indeed, 29.7% of social media users spent an additional one to two hours per day on social media during 2020.
For some people that was double the amount of time, they were spending before the pandemic.
To meet this response, 85.7% of marketers increased their social media activity when the pandemic began.
Social media marketing was the most effective way for businesses to advertise during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But what exactly do social media marketers use social media to do?
Here are some quick digital marketing statistics to help understand:
Part of social media marketing is understanding your target audience. The only way to do that is by social segmentation.
Basically, you put groups of people together so you can create ads that target them effectively. This is how you create advertising campaigns that scale.
The truth is it works…
About 80% of online buyers have made a purchase from a social media ad.
73% of social media marketers’ main goal is to acquire customers using social ads.
Social media is the ideal place to reach your target market, convert them into leads and drive sales.
Which is the best platform for ads?
Facebook is the most popular social media platform used by 94% of B2B and B2C marketers. This is likely because they have the most advanced ad targeting platform.
Instagram (owned by Facebook) is also popular for marketing. 76% of marketers use Instagram to run ads. 67% of marketers say they plan to use Instagram more in the future.
But when it comes to B2B there is another competitor on the block.
LinkedIn is the top B2B social media marketing platform with 95% of B2B marketers using LinkedIn. LinkedIn does cost more to run ads but it is a professional network making it easier to target B2B audiences.
Even more than that B2B marketers agree that Linkedin is the most effective social media channel for lead generation. But according to G2, only 47% of them use it regularly.
This could mean that LinkedIn has more room to grow in the future.
If you have been in marketing for a long time you will know that content marketing and social media marketing work hand in hand.
How?
Two words: Social Shares.
A social share is when someone takes your piece of content and shares it on social media. This is a great way to increase views on your content and brand.
Studies show that longer-form content tends to get more social shares. You should aim to create content between 1,000 to 2,000 words long.
This will help you maximise social shares and basically get free marketing from others on social media.
That’s ideal, right?
Facebook is still the most popular social media platform in the world in terms of total users in 2022.
Here’s how the numbers look:
| Ranking | Social Media Network | Users (in millions) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2,853 | |
| 2 | YouTube | 2,291 |
| 3 | 2,000 | |
| 4 | 1,386 | |
| 5 | Facebook Messenger | 1,300 |
| 6 | Weixin / WeChat | 1,242 |
| 7 | TikTok | 732 |
| 8 | 606 | |
| 9 | Douyin | 600 |
| 10 | Telegram | 550 |
| 11 | Sina Weibo | 530 |
| 12 | Snapchat | 514 |
| 13 | Kuaishow | 481 |
| 14 | 478 | |
| 15 | 430 | |
| 16 | 397 | |
| 17 | Quora | 300 |
On top of that, Facebook also has about 1.91 billion users worldwide that login and use the platform daily.
79% of internet users in the US have a Facebook profile. This is more than double Instagram where only 32% of US internet users have a profile.
What’s more?
The average user spends about 38 minutes per day on Facebook alone.
The big takeaway here is that Facebook is still the best platform to advertise on.
With the number of users that they have on the platform, you can be confident your target audience is there.
Think about running paid ads on Facebook?
Here’s what you need to know first.
Facebook is the second most popular B2B advertising platform for digital marketers. LinkedIn is the biggest.
With the take-off of video content and ads on social media, many marketers have set out to create videos that get people’s attention.
But 85% of videos on Facebook are watched without sound.
That means you need to create videos that don’t rely on sound to communicate to your target audience. You should also add subtitles when possible.
The pandemic also helped Facebook.
Facebook was the most-used social platform in the United States throughout the pandemic (78.1%). Instagram came in second place at (49.5%).
Instagram has the 4th most popular social media site in the world.
Instagram has over 1 billion active monthly users and a total user base of 1.386 billion.
But for marketers, it generates the second highest ROI of all social media channels. Indeed, Instagram has:
It has become a popular platform for small business owners to market and sell on.
Getting a follower on Instagram is also worth more than on Facebook. Instagram followers are worth an average order value of $65 while Facebook followers are only worth $55.
What sort of content should you be posting on Instagram?
People. Photos and videos showing faces get 30% more likes than without.
The more genuine you can make your posts the more engagement you will get.
Despite what most people think…
Twitter is still a popular platform. It’s got even more interest since the announcement that Elon Musk was buying it.
Approximately 52% of all Twitter users use the platform daily. 80% of people access the Twitter app on their phone.
Twitter’s problem isn’t that they don’t have enough users. Their problem is the fact that marketers struggle to run profitable ad campaigns.
Only 7% of businesses that use Twitter said that they saw an improvement in brand preference. Twitter also has the lowest ranking for ROI amongst social media channels in the US. That’s very bad.
The good news is that Twitter is great for organic marketing.
Personally, I have been able to drive a ton of traffic with my Twitter profile organically.
LinkedIn is probably one of the most interesting platforms available to marketers.
61 million of LinkedIn’s users are senior-level influencers and 40 million are in decision-making positions.
91% of marketing executives list LinkedIn as the top place to find quality content.
If you want to reach senior managers and executives, it’s hard to deny that LinkedIn is the best place to do it.
In fact, LinkedIn drives more than half of all social traffic to B2B sites and B2B blogs. If you are in the B2B space LinkedIn should be one of your primary social media channels.
Over 1 million LinkedIn users publish content weekly.
57% of traffic on LinkedIn is from mobile devices, which means there is a good chunk of LinkedIn users (43%) accessing LinkedIn from a desktop device.
There is a lot of room for growth on LinkedIn for both organic content and paid advertising.
YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world.
Although it is a search engine, it still fits in the social media space because of the engagement and interactivity you can have on it.
And there is certainly no lack of engagement. Over 1 billion hours of videos are watched every day on YouTube.
The average time spent every day on YouTube is 18 minutes. This is pretty high considering the total number of users YouTube has.
YouTube is also a good place for marketers to be.
83% of online consumers said they preferred YouTube as their main video platform. 70% of watch time on YouTube is done from mobile devices alone.
Like Facebook, YouTube is so big your target audience is definitely on the platform regularly.
Note: If you have a Youtube channel, you can use a Youtube tracker tool to check the rankings of your videos on Youtube.
Content marketing is a core part of a digital marketing strategy.
62% of marketers plan to increase content marketing budgets within the next fiscal year. And there’s a reason for it.
Content marketing works.
It’s a great way to attract your ideal audience and build a solid relationship with them.
Here are some of the top digital marketing statistics about content.
Despite what you may have heard…
Blogging is far from dead. An overwhelming 77% of online users said they regularly read blog posts. Combining blogging with SEO is still one of the best content marketing strategies available today.
80% of B2B companies use blog content marketing for lead generation. 59% of B2C marketers increased their content marketing budgets in 2020 compared to 2019.
Regardless of who your customers are and what industry you are in, blogging is an effective way to connect with them.
83% of B2C content marketers use blog posts or short articles as an essential part of their content marketing strategy. 38% of B2B company blogs publish content to educate their audience.
Writing high-quality blog posts is a great way to bridge the gap between customers and businesses.
But the key to creating great blogs is:
88% of the most successful content marketers prioritise valuable information over sales messages. This is in stark contrast to the 50% of least successful content marketers who are more sales-focused.
The statistics are clear here.
Your blog posts need to be offering solid educational value that helps build a relationship with the target audience.
The other way round doesn’t work as effectively.
The fastest-growing form of content marketing is video.
Video marketing use has increased by 41% since 2016. This figure is expected to continue to grow significantly in the future.
Why is video marketing increasing?
Consumers like watching videos. 96% of online consumers have watched a video about a product or service. 84% of consumers purchased a product because they watched a marketing video.
The truth is video works.
People want to watch videos when they are learning about new products and services. Video also has very good conversion rates compared to other forms of content.
78% of online video marketers say video has directly increased their sales.
With the rise of video on social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok, video has become a normal part of our daily lives.
It makes sense then that marketers would take advantage of it.
87% of video marketers used YouTube for advertising last year. This makes it the most widely used video marketing platform for the seventh year in a row.
And the COVID-19 pandemic only helped.
74% of marketers said the pandemic made them more likely to use video for marketing. 24% of marketers tried video for the first time in 2020.
If you haven’t added video to your content marketing mix – now is the time.
Email might be one of the most underused digital marketing strategies in the world.
Although lots of marketers know about email marketing, it’s not used as effectively as it could be. These email marketing statistics will show you how powerful email marketing really is.
Email marketing has some of the highest conversion rates of any digital marketing strategy and emails are first-party data that your business owns.
3.71% is the average conversion rate for email marketing.
48% of marketing professionals said email marketing was highly effective to drive more conversions.
Here’s the problem:
Good email content takes time and it’s a one-and-done kind of strategy. Emails are not really an evergreen marketing strategy.
That’s why intelligent marketers try to repurpose their emails whenever possible.
74% of B2C marketers said that they regularly use their email newsletters for content marketing as well.
That means they find ways to turn each email into some form of content. This is a great way to scale content without it taking up all of your time.
Automating email as much as possible is also important for business. 85% of B2B use email marketing software to manage and distribute all of their content.
Having great software is important to deliver high-quality content consistently.
But the key to success with email marketing is open rates.
That’s where automation can become your secret weapon.
Automated email campaigns average 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates. This is compared to the regular one and done email campaigns.
What this really means is that getting people to opt-in to something that has an automated email marketing campaign at the back of it is one of the most effective ways to drive sales.
And remember…
Everything these days is mobile – that includes email.
63% of all emails are opened on mobile devices.
People think of paid advertising as the holy grail of digital marketing. The truth is that paid ads can deliver excellent results for your business very quickly.
Here are some digital marketing statistics about paid advertising to keep in mind.
The average person sees over 5,000 ads per day.
There is no doubt the paid ads market is competitive and you need to create great ads people love.
Total worldwide digital ad spend reached $521 billion in 2021. It is expected to surpass $600 billion in 2022 and reach as high as $876.1 billion by 2026.
What kind of digital ads is worth running?
The most popular ads at the moment are video ads on mobile devices. Mobile video ad spend made up about 72% of the digital ad spend in 2021.
In 2020, mobile ad placements increased by over 70%.
There is clearly a huge trend toward mobile video ads. But video ads aren’t the only paid ads medium that marketers use.
While 55.2% of digital ad spend will go to display ads in 2022, 40.2% of ad spend is expected to go to search-related ads.
Search ads such as Google text ads are still a popular way to advertise.
Retargeting ads have also become a popular strategy for paid advertisers. Research shows that retargeting can lift ad engagement rates by over 400%.
The click-through rate (CTR) is 180.6% higher for retargeted users compared to cold audiences.
Simply put – Retargeting works.
But 54% of customers said they get annoyed when targeted with an ad for something they’ve already bought.
If you are running retargeting ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram or YouTube – exclude customers that have already purchased.
What about the pandemic?
There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic did affect the digital advertising industry. Paid ads didn’t perform as expected in 2020.
Global ad spend projections were missed by about $20 billion because of the pandemic. That’s not to say that digital advertising spend decreased.
Digital ad spending actually increased by 12.7% in 2020. But this was less than the 13.6% experts originally predicted.
It seems that business owners were nervous about the impact of COVID-19 on the business world and chose to cut marketing budgets slightly.
On top of that, there is also some correlation between the infamous Apple iOS 11 tracking permission update.This affected the ability of big advertising platforms such as Meta and Google to track ad results accurately.
Meta said that the IOS 11 update is still affecting their business and will cost them about $10 billion this year.
However, in 2021, paid ad markets rebounded significantly.
Digital ad spend increased by 20.4%.
This was because the openness of consumers to engage with social ads increased during the pandemic.
Ecommerce statistics showed that the pandemic greatly increased online sales in 2020 and media buyers jumped at the chance to regain sales in 2021.
So far I have covered a ton of digital marketing statistics.
To help you get the biggest takeaways from all of these digital marketing stats, I want to share some trends in marketing that’s working for businesses right now.
If you are looking for actionable information that can help grow your sales – pay close attention to this next section.
Increasing website speed should be a core focus for every business.
Website load speed is a ranking factor for SEO and fast loading speeds increase conversion rates. 0 to 4-second load times are shown to be the best for conversion rates.
The truth is that even a 1-second delay reduced customer satisfaction by 16%. And that’s just 1 second. Imagine if you have a 2 or 3-second delay.
What’s the best way to measure website speed?
Largest Content Paint (LCP).
This is one of the most important core web vitals set up by Google to measure website performance. LCP should load within 2.5 seconds to provide a good user experience.
You can use the Google PageSpeed tool to measure your LCP effectively on both mobile and desktop quickly and easily.
Speaking of mobile…
Mobile devices (including phones and tablets) accounted for 60.9% of organic search traffic on Google in 2021. You can now expect that almost ⅔ of your site traffic will come from mobile devices.
What’s more?
70% of websites in Google’s search results now have mobile-first indexing. The mobile version of your website should be your biggest priority.
Make sure that your site:
Google has said that they remove 37% of URLs from their top 10 when the search query is made from a mobile device.
If you don’t have a solid mobile version of your website you will get less organic search traffic and your conversion rates will drop off.
Mobile marketing is growing and will continue to grow for a long-time to come.
Why?
Consumers spend about 4.2 hours per day on their mobile devices. This is up 20% from last year. On top of that, mobile commerce (or m-commerce) grew by more than 30% worldwide during 2020.
This means that more people are making online purchases from mobile devices than they ever have before.
Businesses are also investing in mobile marketing to meet the demand. On average companies spend about 18.5% of their entire marketing budget on mobile marketing.
This is expected to grow by more than 70% this year.
But you need to be clever with how you market on mobile devices.
77% of mobile internet users said that targeted mobile ads are annoying rather than helpful. So, you need to be smart with the types of ads you run and campaigns you put together
A quality mobile marketing campaign can impact your business significantly now and in the future!
As we saw before…
Influencer marketing on social media is exploding.
52% of European ecommerce retailers say influencer marketing offers the best ROI for their business at the moment.
They expect to slowly shift away from social media ads and spend more on influencer marketing by 2030.
It makes sense right… You can take advantage of other people’s brands who have built trust with your target customers.
“Influencers bridge the gap between introducing your products and services to your target audience in a powerful way.”
This year, 75% of ecommerce stores say that they are actively working or plan to work with social media influencers.
Conclusion: Social media will always be around in some form.
What will change is:
There you have it.
The top digital marketing statistic worth knowing right now.
Use these digital marketing statistics to guide your marketing strategy this year.
Choose the digital marketing channels that will help you reach your customers and be smart with the types of marketing you do.
What was the digital marketing statistic that stuck out to you most?
Want more statistics posts? Take a look at these blogs:
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