Adobe's Global Digital Advertising Update Sees Increase in Social Engagement and Mobile Traffic

Adobe has released their Q3 2012 Global Digital Index Report, which analyzes and reports the findings on social engagement and paid searches.

Adobe is pretty focused on the customer experience. The provider of digital marketing solutions conducts a lot of research into trends in its industry. In August we saw research pointing to the growth of mobile for online shopping.

Now we dig deeper into the what's happening in the digital advertising industry today and where it is headed next year. The data in this report (Q3 2012 Digital Advertising Update) came from over 260 billion impressions for 338 companies and the activity of 70 million fans — taken from Adobe AdLens and Adobe Social.

Search Trends

Web traffic has started to shift in more of mobile route with the increase of smartphones and tablets. At the same time, search spend is also increasing in the US, UK and Germany, despite a bad economy, demonstrating how important search still is in the marketers arsenal of advertising tools.

ROI and Spend

• Searches and ROI has been growing in the U.K, U.S and Germany over the past year. In the US search spend was up by 11 percent, and ROI improved by 26 percent. In the UK and Germany spend was up by 36 percent and 25 percent, respectively, YoY.
• The percentages that were related to specific search engines in the last quarter didn’t change much. Bing/Yahoo! increased by one per cent, while Google declined by one per cent.

Click Volume and CPC

• Click volume had a surge of activity over the last quarter. Google, which was down in the last quarter has slowly been improving. Their average for this quarter was up 21 percent YoY, while Bing/Yahoo decreased to 11 percent YoY.
• Google CPCs were down 10% YoY, and the report points to the increase in mobile clicks as part of the reason for this.

Mobile Devices

Overall search spend has increased across all devices, but conversion rates, CPCs and ROI varies widely. Conversion rates vary by device and OS, with iOS nearly double those of Android. This supports the idea that marketers need to organize their search spend differently across devices.

Social Engagement

Facebook has become a key source for companies to spread their brand. According to the advertising update, engagement, which is defined as likes, comments and shares, on the social network grew about 896 percent YOY. It was determined that increased engagement is partly a result of platform updates (specifically Timeline), new metrics for acquisition and engagement, and more effective social marketing. 

Forecasting Search

Adobe is expecting search to have a strong retail season, with a prediction of 15-20% growth in both the US and Europe. It also expects CPCs to increase due to the holiday season and to Google Shopping transitioning to a paid model. Paid search clicks are also expected to continue to increase from mobile devices (smartphone or tablet). And finally, expect that Facebook advertising will grow.

Report Conclusions

• Social Engagement is becoming a key and valuable tool that should be used when marketing a product to a general or specific audience.
• Search should also continue to be part of the marketing tool set as it continues to grow, especially on mobile devices.
• Marketers should spend time forming a plan on how to make search spend part of their tool set, as it is becoming important to digital marketing. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

ForeSee Study Ranks Retail Mobile Experiences, No Surprises on the Best

Retail mobile experiences are rated in a ForSee Study. Bet you don't know who made the top of the list. Okay, maybe you do.

According to the Mobile Satisfaction Index: Retail Edition, released Thursday by customer experience analysis firm ForeSee, Net retailer Amazon took top place for customer satisfaction with the retail mobile experience. Avon and Apple took the next two top spots. The report utilized 4500 customer surveys conducted last month. About three-quarters of those surveyed used phones, and the rest used tablets.

The Mobile Experience Is Different

ForeSee President and CEO Larry Freed said in a statement that “customers experience the web differently on mobile devices, and companies that do not measure the mobile experience miss an opportunity to solidify customer loyalty and risk losing customers to companies that do so.” (Editor's note: Check out: Adobe 2012 Mobile Survey Highlights the Rise of Mobile and the Demise of the User Experience).

On the Index’s 100 point scale, scores ranged from 84 to 76. ForeSee said that it considered a score of 80 or above to be a “benchmark of excellence,” and half of the measured retailers did so. Amazon scored 84, Avon 83 and Apple 82, but overall, satisfaction with the top retailers was only 79.

Following Apple were, in order, Victoria’s Secret, Barnes and Noble, eBay, Netflix, Staples, Walgreens, Best Buy, Groupon, J.C. Penney, Dell, Home Depot, Living Social, Macy’s, Walmart, Sears and Target.

The mobile retail experience is still a work in progress. ForeSee found that mobile retail experience lags behind the web-based retail experience, which, by now, is fairly uniform across desktops and laptops.

Mobile Matters

But mobile devices have to contend with a variety of screen sizes, OSs, hardware specs and transmission speeds, all of which make a consistent experience across devices difficult to achieve.

Comparing mobile satisfaction scores to web satisfaction — based on ForeSee’s Spring 2012 Online Satisfaction Index — the research firm said that “nearly all of the top retailers perform better on traditional websites.”

All of this matters, ForeSee said. Satisfied customers are 69 percent more likely to make a purchase on their mobile device, 72 percent more likely to suggest a retailer to someone else, and 58 percent more likely to come back.

Even with the challenges presented by mobile, retailers are increasing their bets — bigtime. According to a new report by Shop.org (available for its members), retailers will spend an average investment of US$ 207,000 on mobile this year. Last year, it was US$ 55,000.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com