Digital Marketing Data: Numbers You Can Use
“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion”
-Edwards Demming
What about the data?
People ask about it and request it all the time. We need more of it because we need to make decisions based on the numbers we see.
Numbers rule the world. Without numbers, most of us wouldn’t know how well (or badly) we’re doing.
Data is the new gold, according to many experts, no matter what industry you’re in because advanced software tools and integrations let you mine data from just about anywhere.
You can mine data from anywhere, including from your digital marketing campaigns and internal software tools.
And you need the right data to know if what you’re doing is successful.
This post is for all your numbers people out there. We thought we’d round up a host of marketing statistics to help you with your presentations, but more importantly, to help you make sure you’re heading down the right path with your digital marketing.
Yes, there’s Bing and Baidu (the Chinese version of Google).
But digital marketing starts and ends with Google, Google searches, and Google products.
Market Share
Google has a 91.5 percent search engine market share worldwide, as of March 2022. By comparison, Bing is second with a paltry 3.1 percent.
In other words, your digital marketing efforts, particularly for SEO, should revolve around getting noticed on Google.
Searches Per Day
People search Google a whopping 8.5 billion times per day, which is more than 3.1 trillion times per year! That’s 5.9 million searches per minute and 99,000 per second, all over the world. Some of your target audience is out there, searching on Google right now.
Google was visited 89.3 billion times last month, and it’s the most visited website ever. Want to see these stats in real-time?
There are 267 million unique visitors to Google every day in the United States. By comparison, the United States has an estimated population of 332.4 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Moz conducted a survey of 1,400 Google users in 2019. A whopping 86 percent of them said they use Google for searches three or more times per day.
Nearly half of all product searches start on Google, with Amazon dominating the rest of the market.
The way people search Google is important, too. A survey of 1,000 people conducted by Search Engine Land in 2018 notes that 90 percent of respondents only clicked on the first page of results. A full 82 percent did a search that included “near me” results. (Don’t bother putting “near me” on your website. More on that later.)
Mobile Versus Desktop
More than half, or 56 percent, of web searches, took place on mobile phones compared to desktops. Keep in mind that B2B companies are more like to appear in a desktop search compared to B2C companies because a lot of B2B firms look for products and services at work at their desks.
A full 63 percent, or nearly two-thirds, of organic Google searches in the United States come from mobile devices rather than desktop. (More on what this means further down the page.)
In terms of mobile, 72.2 percent of people own Android phones all over the world compared to 27 percent for iPhones. In the United States, iPhones account for 59 percent of the market share compared to 40.5 percent for Android.
Google Tools That Help You Make Sense of the Numbers
Fortunately, Google has ways to gather data on how people search for and engage with your web presence.
Google Analytics shows the behavior of people who interact with your website. There, you’ll find things like how people find your website (organically, through paid ads, through links on other websites, and more), what people do once they find your website (called a user journey), how long they stay on particular pages, and what conversions happen on your website.
Important statistics on Google Analytics include:
- Users
- Click-through rate
- New users
- Pageviews
- Conversion goals
The truth is that there is a wealth of data that comes from Google Analytics but fair warning, most people have what’s called “Universal Analytics” on their site which Google says they will phase out next year. This means we’ll all need to learn G4 which is the most recent version of Google Analytics and not nearly as user-friendly.
Google Search Console tells you what keywords people use to find your website, what pages are the most popular, how many times your website showed up in Google searches, and the average search rank for pages, search queries, landing pages, and blogs.
Think of Google Analytics as the way people navigate to and through your website across all channels, while Google Search Console shows you the keywords people use to make your website show up in Google searches. You can gain valuable insights from both Google tools, provided you have the Google Analytics tag set up on your website to enable tracking.
Now, we’ll show you some statistics about content marketing and how it can drive users to your website and social media.
Content Marketing
Content marketing involves putting content out there for people in your target audience to engage with.
Content in this sense means written words, video, images, and audio (podcasts).
Written Words
Your written text includes verbiage on your website, landing pages, blogs, and social media posts. Blogging is a top way to increase engagement with your target audience through written words.
48 percent of companies that have internal marketing strategies leverage blogging as a marketing tool, and 56 percent of marketers say it’s effective, with 10 percent saying it’s their top way of generating traffic for their clients.
Blogs vary in length from short, 500-word pieces to complete guides at 5,000 words or more (like this one!). Thought leadership is particularly helpful when marketing to decision-makers, as 54 percent of decision-makers in companies read at least one hour of thought leadership content every day. Organic search results (more on this later) that rank on the first page of Google average around 1,500 words.
Backlinks to blogs are a major engagement signal for Google, and long-form content (1,000 words or more) get 77 percent more backlinks than short articles, according to Ahrefs. Backlinks occur when another website links to yours. For you Facebook users, it’s like a website “liking” another website by linking to it.
For generating organic traffic, aim for 2,000 words per blog. Those are the blogs that create the most organic traffic for people searching for articles. This is because people want a one-stop place to get all of the information they need about one topic.
When considering blogs for your strategy, it pays to have one or two blogs per month posted to your site.
Video
It should go without saying that video is huge. And you need video as part of your content marketing strategy. MediaKix states that videos will constitute a whopping 82 percent of all global consumer traffic by the end of this year.
More than 80 percent of video marketers say that video directly increased their sales.
Google (YouTube) and Facebook have the most videos viewed per day, while TikTok (even though it’s social media), is coming in strong.
YouTube has 2.6 billion active monthly users, with India having the most users at 467 million, according to Global Media Insight. Google is so huge, it’s the second-largest search engine (after Google, which owns YouTube). The United States has 210 million YouTube viewers every year. Sixteen percent of YouTube traffic (not users) comes from the United States, with India at 9.2 percent. Nearly two-thirds, or 62 percent, of YouTube users in the United States access the platform every single day.
The average YouTube viewer looks at nine different videos every day, and it accounts for 25 percent of all mobile traffic in the world at any given time. That means of all of the time people spend on the internet every day (which is a lot), one-fourth is spent watching YouTube videos!
People spend 14 minutes and 21 seconds on YouTube every day. Divide that by the nine videos someone watches per day, and you see that the average watch time is about 90 seconds. That means videos should be shorter rather than longer.
A whopping 500 hours of video content is uploaded to YouTube every minute.
Facebook (Meta) is also an extremely popular video platform.
The social media giant has 2.91 billion active monthly users and 2.3 billion active daily users, according to HootSuite.
Short videos, under 10 minutes, are the key here. 78 percent of short-video watchers go to YouTube, while 61 percent go to Facebook. TikTok is gaining fast.
For live video, YouTube is tops with 52 percent of viewers heading there, followed by Facebook at 42.6 percent.
However, Facebook is the chosen platform for people ages 25 to 44.
Audio Content
Podcasts have seen a resurgence in recent years, particularly due to celebrities using podcasts during the pandemic to create content. With online platforms like Spotify gaining popularity, podcasts offer easy ways for people to consume content.
How many times have you listened to a podcast during your commute to and from work, either in your car or when riding in public transportation? It fills a valuable space with content relevant to your interests, whether you want podcasts on workouts, health, food, murder mysteries, manufacturing, sustainability, fashion, or whatever topic you want.
More than one-fourth, 28 percent, of the U.S. population over 12 years old listens to at least one podcast per week.
The average listener spends more than 16 hours per week listening to online audio, whether that’s from podcasts, online radio, or music streaming.
More than three-fourths, or 80 percent, of marketers say they want to invest in podcasts and audio at some point in 2022.
No matter what your chosen content type is, a blend of all three kinds (written, video, and audio) can help you achieve better marketing results.
Next, we’ll get into how to make this content searchable for your target audience.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO means employing various strategies to get your content to show up higher in Google searches. It’s a way to bring targeted traffic to your website since people are actively looking for exactly what you do.
Organic search is responsible for 53 percent of all website traffic, according to Search Engine Land. Paid advertising added 15 percent. Even if you spend more money on paid advertising, it might not get the results you can achieve.
Organic search means finding a web page or website by using a search engine and then clicking on the results that are not advertisements. Clicking on a link from another website to get to a certain web page is not considered an organic search result. That’s direct or referral traffic.
Like we said earlier, 90 percent of people only click on the first page of search results. Page two leads to obscurity and no one will find your content.
That’s why you need SEO, in order to try to get on the first page for the searches that matter to your target audience. If you’re on the second page, far fewer people see that content with most searches.
The age-old joke is that you could find Jimmy Hoffa on page two of the search results.
Google tells you that there are over 200 ranking factors (which is sneaky since there are actually over 400!) when determining what pages to rank in search engine results pages (SERPs), according to Backlinko.
Why is getting on the first page important? The number one result receives around 32 percent of the clicks. Half of all marketers say organic search results give them their top ROI, so ranking high is important.
Local SEO
Let’s say you are a coffee shop, local restaurant, car dealer, clothing boutique, bank, dentist’s office, vacuum repair store, barbershop, or grocery store.
That means you cater to the local population that comes into your place of business, as opposed to a manufacturer or e-commerce site that can ship goods anywhere, or a software company or digital marketing agency that can serve clients all over the world.
Local businesses need help ranking for local SEO.
46 percent of all Google searches are for something local, and these searches can be for directions and phone numbers.
82 percent of people search for something that says “near me” in the results. Despite this, there is no point in putting the phrase “near me” on your website or social media. Google determines “near me” results based on someone’s mobile device location or IP address.
A full 63 percent, or nearly two-thirds, of organic Google searches in the United States come from mobile devices rather than desktops, which is why your local company needs to rank for local SEO. More than three-fourths, or 76 percent, of all people who search for something on their smartphones visit a business within a day.
There are a total of 37,000 local searches every second. And people who use Google for local searches end up visiting 1.5 billion locations every month, while 78 percent of searchers buy locally after performing a local search.
You should definitely invest in a local SEO strategy for your web presence. This means having the right keyword strategy for your website, having location data on your website (like an address and phone number), and utilizing a Google My Business (GMB- now called Google Business Profile) listing for each physical location.
A Google Business Profile listing is the information that appears on the right side of the screen on a desktop or the first information that appears on a mobile phone when looking for a local business. Having good local SEO can help you appear above an ordinary Google search in what’s called the local pack, where the top three businesses (as determined by Google) appear in a Google Maps section on the search. Here’s one of our previous posts about Google Business Profile basics.
There is one more element to SEO you need to be aware of in terms of trying to generate more traffic for your website.
Voice Searches
Chances are good you’ve used a talk-to-text function on your phone that converts your spoken words to a text message.
You can search for websites on Google using a voice search too.
Oberlo states that 40.2 percent of the U.S. population uses their voices to search. For example, someone might speak into a phone to say “Find a Chinese restaurant near me.” or “Why is the sky blue?”
For some voice searches, Google will respond with spoken words (which is handy if you’re driving in a car). Google will tell you what the nearest Chinese restaurant is to your location. It will also tell you (verbally, mind you) the scientific answer as to why the sky is blue.
The key to know here is that Google only uses the top search result for voice searches.
This is another key reason why you want to rank number one in certain searches.
71 percent of users prefer voice searches instead of typing.
Searches are more than just with phones. One-third of all U.S. consumers own smart speakers at home, where they can ask questions out loud in their homes, and more than half of these smart speaker owners use them at least once a day.
In 2022, 33.2 million shoppers in the United States are expected to use smart speakers for their shopping, while 51 percent of all consumers in the U.S. utilize voice searches to research products.
On ordinary Google searches, you need to try to rank for Google Featured Snippets if you want to rank for voice searches, which are considered the top result. You can see a Google Featured Snippet by asking a question, like “How do I change my oil?” If you see text outlined below a blue web page URL, that is what’s called the featured snippet that you will hear read back to you on a voice search.
Featured snippets appear in approximately 11 percent of Google searches, according to Moz. Featured snippets usually answer common questions that people ask.
SEO is a way to appear higher in organic search results, but there is a way to make people aware of your brand through online advertising, particularly via Google Ads.
Google Ads
Paid advertising is a great way to get your business in front of your target audience. Google offers a few ways to advertise, including through a local search, at the top of a Google search engine results page, and even when you search for a competitor’s website. Google also offers video advertising like the ones you see when watching a YouTube video.
You can also create a shopping ad that appears at the top of a Google search when people search for various products, like TVs, vacuum cleaners, lightbulbs, organic oatmeal, and plenty more. If you can buy it, there will be a shopping ad for it on Google.
We focus on Google ads because Google dominates the search market as noted earlier.
Around 63 percent of people have clicked on a Google Ad, according to The Social Shepherd. That’s a good sign because the whole point of having an advertisement is to get people to click on it.
One-third, or 33 percent, of all mobile advertising goes to Google.
Businesses continue to spend a lot of money on Google Ads. In 2020, Google Ads accounted for a whopping $146.92 billion of Google’s overall revenue. When you consider Google’s revenue was $181.69 in that same year, that is quite a huge chunk of change. In Q3 of 2021 alone, Google saw ad revenue of $61.69 billion. (Keep in mind, Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet, and Alphabet does a lot of other things aside from search engines, like self-driving car technology.)
One main feature of Google Ads is the pay-per-click (PPC) feature. PPC generates twice as many visitors to websites compared to SEO (but not as much traffic, which takes into account returning users). Google Ads are great for a short-term strategy with higher results for first-time users. SEO, on the other hand, is great for long-term strategies and returning users.
SEO and Google Ads go hand in hand. You only pay for the clicks you receive on Google Ads. However, your Google Ad costs can go down if you optimize your website’s landing pages properly. Google scores landing pages from 0 to 10, with 10 being the most relevant. Even a difference of going from a landing page quality score of 4 to 8 can lower your cost per click by 60 percent.
The average click-through rate on Google Ads is 2 percent, meaning only 2 percent of the ads that appear on Google are clicked on. However, 65 percent of the people who click on Google Ads make purchases.
When you have your Google Ads set up properly, they can make a real difference to your sales and revenue.
SEO and Google Ads rely on having great websites in place so people can notice your company’s web presence.
Websites
Your website is the digital front door of your company. It is the main base of operations where people go to find out more about you.
You need more than written words to go on your website to make an impression. You need it to respond to your users’ needs and be optimized for mobile devices so your target audience can interact with your website in relevant ways.
It takes people about 2.6 seconds to form a first impression of a website, according to Science Daily. That’s probably why Google announced in 2021 that their set of Core Web Vitals, which essentially assesses how fast your web pages load on a mobile device, became a more prominent ranking factor. Your website must load within 2.5 seconds on a mobile device using Google’s metrics to get a good score.
Increasing site load times on mobile devices by just one-tenth of a second resulted in an 8.4 percent increase in conversion rates for retail sites and 10.1 percent for travel websites.
There are about 2 billion websites on the internet, but only 400 million are currently active, says Blogging Wizard. Around 455 billion websites use WordPress (this figure includes inactive websites). Of the 400 million active websites, 20 million are e-commerce.
Around 4.6 billion people use the internet every day, notes HubSpot. And web design is essential for getting people to engage with your website.
Having responsive websites is one key to having more conversions. 73 percent of web designers, of which GoodFirms polled 200 of them in 2021, believe that a lack of responsive website design is the top reason why visitors leave websites. Slow loading times were the top answer at 88.5 percent. Another 61.5 percent said bad navigation was an issue.
Websites are great tools to have, but they aren’t the only tools you need to have a great web presence. Social Media offers another avenue to generate traffic.
Social Media
There is no shortage of social media channels out there, and businesses continue to latch on to them simply because they’re new, but that’s not a good enough reason to invest in a presence. The key is to go where your customers are.
Social media is the number one channel used in marketing, even more popular than websites. Now, we’re not saying that you don’t need a website since most people check out the business website for credibility and trust.
You have two main ways businesses use social media are:
- Post content regularly on your social media channels and use search terms and hashtags to get noticed.
- Pay for social media ads to show up in people’s feeds.
We’re not saying this is the best strategy, but it’s certainly the most popular.
Our advice is to pick the most relevant social media channels based on your target audience and post consistently while investing in paid ads. Here’s more about how to pick the right social media channel for your business.
Facebook (Meta) is the king of social media with 1.8 billion active daily users as of the end of 2021, an increase of 11 percent from the previous year. 98.3 percent of Facebook users access the social media site on their mobile devices. More than two-thirds, or 69 percent, of Americans use Facebook.
Video is huge for Facebook. It’s the second-most popular video platform behind Google/YouTube.
The average person who watches a video on Facebook spends about 10 seconds watching any given video, according to EarthWeb. That means you have less than 10 seconds to make an impression. A whopping 85 percent of Facebook videos are watched with the sound off. You’d better make a good visual impression if you want to maintain your audience. Around 20 percent of Facebook videos are live-streamed.
Our suggestion? Make a Facebook video ad around 15 seconds long with great visual elements in it.
Facebook is a great platform for advertisements because it has a vaunted information-gathering suite for when you have a business account.
TikTok
TikTok has seen a meteoric rise from 2019 to 2022. It was the most downloaded app in 2021, according to HootSuite, with 656 million downloads that year. The short-video platform has 1 billion monthly active users, and it’s the sixth-most popular social media app as of 2022 (Facebook and YouTube are the top two). TikTok has been downloaded a total of 3 billion times.
It is enormously popular with the younger crowd. Nearly two-thirds (59 percent) of people ages 18 to 34 view TikTok favorably. You’ll find TikTok users on other social media platforms like Facebook (84.6 percent of TikTok users are also on Facebook), Instagram (83.9 percent), and YouTube (80.5 percent).
Read more about whether or not you should use Tik Tok to market your business.
Instagram is owned by Facebook, and it’s one of the most popular social media platforms out there with 500 million daily active users and 1.1 billion overall users. The average Instagram user spends around 10 hours a month on the platform and 30 minutes a day.
So if you want to make some short videos or post a series of photos to tell visual stories, Instagram is the place to be.
LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, and it’s the place where business professionals go to connect, discuss their professional lives, and look for employment opportunities. Companies can leverage this social media platform to recruit workers, too.
LinkedIn has around 774 million users, with one-quarter of them in the United States. It’s the largest B2B display advertiser in the United States, which gives you an opportunity to market your company to other businesses. For example, you can market your firm to decision-makers based on their job title on LinkedIn, such as a CEO, vice president, marketing manager, lead engineer, and more.
There is one popular feature on LinkedIn that is gaining traction. LinkedIn live streams have more than doubled, with an increase of 158 percent, from 2020 to 2022.
The important statistic here: Four out of five LinkedIn members drive business decisions at their companies, which is not surprising when you consider that 90 percent of B2B marketers use the platform for organic marketing results.
You might be surprised to find Pinterest here. It’s actually more popular than Twitter. Pinterest is visually based, and its appeal is when users curate collections of photos about particular items of interest to them that they pin to their feed.
Pinterest has 459 million active global users every month, and women make up 60 percent of Pinterest’s audience.
The interesting thing to note here is that 97 percent of searches on Pinterest are unbranded. Most Pinterest users (85 percent) use the platform to plan new projects, such as decorating a home, setting up a nursery, planting a garden, planning a vacation, or preparing for a wedding.
Pinterest is a great platform for any business that uses projects as a basis for its business model. Wedding planners, interior designers, nurseries/garden centers, woodworkers, artists, plumbers, renovators, electricians, and more, all can benefit from this platform.
Twitter has fallen a lot in the past five years, considering it was one of the first major social media platforms when it was founded in 2006.
As of 2022, Twitter has 319 million users. Despite it taking a tumble in the ranks of social media platforms, it was the 12th-most visited website in 2021. Its user base is mostly male, and 82 percent of B2B content marketers leveraged Twitter for organic marketing that year.
At this time, Elon Musk is making moves to buy Twitter and change its censorship policies. It will be interesting to see if he is successful and if so, what the results of this purchase will be in the future.
Now that we’ve gone over social media, we’ll take a look at one of the best things about social media, which is video.
Video On Social Media
The key to videos is to keep them short when you want to capture someone’s attention. 15 seconds is often enough time to get someone to convert. In 2020, most videos (4.8 million) uploaded to Wistia were less than a minute long, while nearly 54 percent of short-form videos saw engagement.
A video is a powerful tool for driving conversions. Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of businesses said that at least one video on Facebook earned them a new client in the past 12 months, while 83 percent of video marketers said videos helped them to capture new leads.
Here’s an interesting one: 84 percent of consumers have said a video by a brand convinced them to make a purchase.
Even more remarkable, you need to leverage videos on social media. Video is the second most-used way to engage with audiences on social media, and live videos are the third most popular way.
YouTube and Facebook are the most popular video channels, by far, used by 85 percent and 79 percent of video marketers.
The most amazing statistic (especially for people who remember Nielsen ratings), on mobile devices alone, YouTube reaches more 18- to 34-year-olds than any TV network. YouTube is popular with older folks, with 49 percent of people 65 and older using the platform.
Speaking of old school, what about email marketing?
Email marketing is far from dead, even though it’s the oldest form of digital marketing in existence.
The average click-through rate (CTR, the number of times someone clicks on a link in an email) is about 2.13 percent. The rate goes up a bit on Friday with a CTR of 2.7 percent. Most emails are opened between 9 a.m. and noon in the United States.
Audience segmentation, where marketers tailor emails to specific areas of their audiences, is crucial to getting results. Marketers who use segmented email campaigns see as high as a 760 percent increase in their return on investment from the campaign.
Email is still an effective marketing tool. Email users are expected to grow to 4.48 billion in 2024. A survey of 1,000 small business owners in 2019 showed that email marketing was the second-most effective campaign for building brand awareness.
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to email marketing. While it’s true that you can gather information on emails from lists you can purchase, you can curate your own lists with inbound marketing thanks to simple forms on your website. There is one great thing you can use with your email lists, and that revolves around Facebook Ads. Facebook can use your email list, compare it with known Facebook users, and then develop personas of people who would see your Facebook Ads based on the users who have the emails you plug into Facebook’s advertising platform. You simply need a business Facebook account for this to work.
All of these statistics and ways to advertise are great, but you need to get people to click on your digital properties in order to determine how well people engage with your brand.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization is the art of getting people to convert, whether you want them to click on an ad, call you, fill out a form, download an app, or come by your store in person.
With your business website, there are two primary ways of getting “more.” First, you can use many or most of the marketing tools above to drive more traffic to your site, or you can make adjustments to your site in order to convert more of your visitors to actual customers. That’s conversion optimization.
In 2020, two-thirds of Google searches ended without a click, according to SparkToro. Meanwhile, 33.6 percent of searches ended with an organic click. 1.6 percent ended with someone clicking on an ad.
In other words, you have to really capture the attention of your target audience to make headway in the digital space.
Backlinko analyzed 5 million Google search results. They found that the top Google search result had a click-through rate of 31.7 percent, and the top spot is 10 times more likely to get a click compared to the web page in slot number 10 (at the bottom of the first page).
SmartInsights backs up this analysis, stating that the top result gets a CTR of 39.6 percent, while the CTR for the second position is 18.4 percent and number three is 10.1 percent (one-fourth of the top position).
What’s the takeaway from conversion rates?
If you want to get the top CTR, you have to be at the top of Google search engine results pages.
Key Takeaways of This Digital Marketing Data
Now that we’ve thrown a lot of data at you, what are the key takeaways?
There is a lot you can do to make your marketing efforts pay off, and it starts with a strategy based on your current web presence and where you want it to go.
The data listed above is intended to help you better Identify where you should invest your time and money with your digital marketing.
Far too often, we see business owners take a shotgun to the rifle range and wonder why they aren’t getting better results. While data like this is helpful, it’s also helpful to speak to digital marketing experts to help you guide your business in the right direction. Because there are so many marketing elements out there, it can get overwhelming when it comes down to doing the right things to market your business online.
Contact us for more information! We’d love to set up a free consultation to help you make informed decisions.
