I was minding my own business when, unprovoked, these digital marketing statistics snuck up and attacked me the other day. The nerve!
After I dusted myself off, I realized that these were harmless and rambunctious numbers meant to educate, and possibly amuse me. Perhaps you will have a similar reaction.
A few digital marketing statistics that made me go wow:
1. 93 percent of U.S. traffic comes from Google search, Google Images, and Google Maps.
If you think about the competitive nature of business in general, it’s hard to believe that one company owns 93 percent market share of anything.
There is an interesting dichotomy of human nature. We demand choice but love convenience even more. The concentrated nature of search concerns me, but not enough to use something other than Google!
We see the same thing happening with Facebook as a social network and Amazon as an eCommerce hub. We generally only have the mental bandwidth for one solution.
Source: (Sparktoro)
2. SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media.
This makes me wonder … is social media marketing an oxymoron? If organic social media doesn’t drive customers to your site then what is it supposed to do? Is social media marketing really just social media advertising these days?
Why do social media marketing at all?
Source: (BrightEdge)
3. Content with high levels of social engagement tends to perform well in voice search. In fact, the average voice search result has 1,199 Facebook shares and 44 Tweets.
Oh.
That’s why we do social media marketing. Never mind.
Source: (Backlinko)
4. 76 percent of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day.
This is not necessarily a surprising number, but it’s an impressive one. Emphasizes the importance of local search and that means local content.
Source: (Think With Google)
5. The average length of a first-page YouTube video is nearly 15 minutes.
This fact made me do some pondering and I am one dangerous man when I ponder.
On the surface, it makes no sense. Shorter videos are most popular on YouTube — music videos, funny cats, how-to demonstrations.
So I looked at my YouTube home page and every single video was UNDER 10 minutes … except one, which was 90 minutes. So yeah … I guess this entire page would average to be about 15 minutes.
I think this is probably a deceptive statistic. The average length of a first-page YouTube video might be 15 minutes, but MOST of the popular videos are nowhere near that long.
Source: (Backlinko)
6. 52.2 percent of all website traffic worldwide comes from mobile phones.
With the global penetration of smart phones, I would have guessed this to be much higher. According to the analytics for my site, about 80 percent of you are reading this blog on a mobile device, for example.
So I did some digging. Turns out this statistic is three years old and the growth has been about a 2 percentage points a year. So if we added another 6 percent to the number we’re close to 60 percent and that makes more sense to me.
Source: (Statista)
7. On average, ranking in position #1 on mobile gets you 27.7% of the clicks, whereas ranking in position #1 on desktop gets you 19.3% of the clicks.
Wow. Just wow. I think smaller screens result in less engagement on every kind of content and this supports that view.
On the desktop people scroll down and look at more sites – more engagement. On mobile, it’s just getting the job done.
8. Websites with strong domain authority tend to rank well in voice search. In fact, the average domain rating of a Google Home result is 76.8.
As more search goes to voice, this is a sobering fact. There are not many non-media businesses in this world with a domain authority that high. For a typical small business, getting to a 50 is a massive achievement. Does this mean small businesses are screwed?
Source: (Backlinko)
9. There is a big difference in the results of a voice search and a web search on the same topic. Only 75 percent of voice search results rank in the top 3 for that query on the web.
On the surface, this seems counter-intuitive. Why should a person see differing search results in two different places from the same company — Google?
As I dug into this, it looks like the content criteria that lifts a site in a voice search is significantly different than what is considered in a web search. A good explanation can be found with the source of this statistic: (Backlinko)
10. The average cost of buying a link is $361.44.
I have never accepted a paid backlink on this site. It makes me feel like I am crossing a line that takes advantage of the trust of my readers. But $361? That’s not bad in a down economy.
Source: (Ahrefs)
BONUS STATISTIC: 98 percent of the people who read Mark Schaefer’s {grow} blog are 78.2 percent smarter and 89.3 percent better looking than their competitors.
I just made that up. Or did I?
Most of these digital marketing statistics were originally curated on the Ahrefs blog
Thanks to Married to the Sea and Toothpaste for Dinner for the awesome cartoons.
Top illustration courtesy Unsplash.com.
