10 interesting online marketing statistics we've seen this week

It's time for another round up of key digital stats we've seen over the past week. 

Today's selection includes SME ecommerce, responsive design, real-time bidding and multichannel retail. 

For more, check out our Internet Statistics Compendium.

Do you agree with our Modern Marketing Manifesto? 

Next week the Festival of Marketing debuts in the city of London, with conferences, events and parties all built around the core tenets of Econsultancy's Modern Marketing Manifesto. 

We recently surveyed around 700 Econsultancy users to see to what extent they agreed with the 'pillars' of the manifesto.

• Modern marketing must be connected, joined-up and integrated (83% strongly agree).
• Modern marketers have to be commercially minded (75%).
• Improving the customer experience must be the relentless focus of modern marketing (69%).
• Marketers should sit at the board table and help set strategy (68%).
• Marketing is becoming increasingly technology-driven (66%).
• Creativity, story-telling and innovation are more important than ever (65%).
• Personalisation offers the greatest opportunity to transform brand experience (47%).
• 'Social' should be in a company's DNA (44%).
• Data is the bedrock on which a modern business should be built (23%).
• Consumers control the message, not brands (41%). 

Consumers control the message, not brands:

Disabled consumers' use of the internet

Ofcom recently published its Disabled Consumers' Ownership of Communications Services Report, which reveals younger disabled people now have roughly the same level of internet access as the non-disabled.

• Among 15-34s the figures for internet access stand at 90% for the disabled compared with 93% for the non-disabled. This increases still further for the affluent consumers in the 15-34 age group.
• However, for older (65+) less affluent disabled people, internet access levels are at their lowest (23%). This is significantly lower than among non-disabled people of the same age and socio-economic group (37%).
• Across all age groups, internet access is 55% for disabled consumers, compared with 83% for non-disabled consumers. This can partly be explained by their older profile as half of disabled people are aged 65+.

Benefits and challenges of working with DSPs

One of the topics covered in our new Online Advertisers Survey Report is the benefits and challenges of working with DSPs.

Benefits: 

• Improved targeting was cited as the main benefit (67%) of working with DSPs.
• Real-time understanding of campaign performance (53%)
• The ability to buy at impression level (53%).

The challenges:

• 64% of advertisers identified the availability of inventory as the main issue when working with DSPs.
• 48% cited poor service levels.
• The proportion of respondents citing under-delivery of campaigns was down from 49% in 2011 to 45% this year.

What are the challenges you face working with DSPs?

Use of responsive design

• Just 11% of the UK's 100 highest spending advertisers currently use responsive design, including Nissan, Direct Line, Go Compare, Microsoft and Chanel.
• Though the number of brands that have gone responsive remains quite low, the report also found that in August 2013 58% of the top 100 advertisers in 2012 had mobile optimised websites.
• Our own research among Econsultancy subscribers found that 46% of businesses use responsive design.
• According to Venda, just one of the UK's top 50 most visited retail sites, Currys, currently hosts a responsive website. 

Multichannel customer experience

• Amazon has topped yet another usability survey after delivering a consistently excellent customer experience across its desktop and mobile platforms.
• House of Fraser came a close second followed by Marks & Spencer, Debenhams and Interflora.

These are the overall findings from the eDigitalResearch study:

Car hire searches

• Car rental search volumes in August saw a 28% uplift on May levels and queries for vehicle hire in short-haul destinations saw the biggest increase, according to research from Greenlight.
• According to the agency's latest "Car Hire Sector Report", 1.2m searches were made on Google UK for car rental services in domestic, short-haul and long-haul destinations, up from 838,873 in May and the highest for the year thus far.
• Searches for car hire in short-haul destinations saw the biggest rise, with a 53% upswing, with searches totalling 452,580 in August compared to 295,996 three months earlier.
• 'Car hire spain' was the most frequently used term to source car hire services in short-haul destinations, online. Queried 27,100 times, it accounted for 6% of searches. Others included 'car hire italy', 'car hire portugal' and 'car hire france'.
• The most prominent site car hire searches in was travelsupermarket.com, which was visible to a volume of 65,266 searches saw it garner a 14% share of visibility.

Distracted customers

Responsys launched its 'Distracted Consumers' whitepaper this week, looking at the attention spans of consumers. 

• The report, which surveyed approximately 2,000 adults, found that UK consumers are on average spending 30 seconds or less reading or listening to marketing communications online. 
• 50% of consumers spend on average between 5 – 30 seconds on incoming marketing emails.
• 32% spend the same amount of time reading marketing texts.
• Incoming social posts from brands are the least likely to be read with 27% of consumers spending 5 – 30 seconds reading tweets, Facebook posts or content posted on other social channels.

Stats from 18,000+ SME ecommerce sites

A recent post on KISSMetrics has some great stats gathered from more than 18,000 ecommerce. Here are just a couple (it's well worth checking out the rest). 

• Search is still important. 30.5% of all traffic to the sites studied came from organic searches on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. 
• Apple device still dominate mobile commerce traffic, with 65% coming from iPads and iPhones. 
• The iPad accounts for 30% of total mobile traffic to e-commerce sites and the iPhone accounts for 35%. The rest is spread over the dozens of Android smart phones, other smart phones, and numerous tablets.

A comeback from Internet Explorer? 

• Net Applications measured IE usage on personal computers growing from 57.6% in August to 57.8% in September.  
• StatCounter's methods put Microsoft's browser in second place, but it grew from 25.6% to 28.6%.

PC and tablet browser share (Statcounter).

Consumer demand for multichannel retail

According to this previously unpublished chart from our Multichannel Retail Survey, consumer demand for the conveniece of using different channels is growing. 

Q: How important is it to be able to purchase from a retailer from different channels e.g. in a store, by mobile, online? (1,000 respondents)