Perspectives & Strategy

Retailer John Wanamaker is credited with saying “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”. Marketing and the Internet has always been an interesting ground for statistics, so we thought this would be an ideal opportunity to look at a few:

25% of the worlds population currently use the internet a massive 1.7 billion people.

The number of users has grown by 380% in the last ten years. The biggest growth areas being the Middle East, Africa, and South America, but growth is occurring everywhere.

0.001% of all information stored on the internet has any relevance to my current goals.

Unable to credit any specific person with this quote and as time goes on the number of zeros between the decimal point and the 1 continues to grow.

On-line advertising response rates are typically lower than 2%.

This is well known and advertisers often forget there are two types of web user the person who is focused on a goal and the casual surfer. The focused person is not interested in the advert irrespective of its relevance – to respond is an interruption. The casual surfer only responds if an advert is relevant.

Visitors make a decision in just eight seconds whether to remain on a web-site.

Marketing Sherpa have given us this gem in their Landing Page Handbook. I know from my own experience that there are some sites that I have visited where the stay is less than two seconds. So we had better make it interesting.

Looking for information, services or products, more than 80% of Internet users rely on search engines.

Naturally without a direct link to the important information we have to search.

85% of these searchers don’t click on sponsored or paid links.

Interesting, maybe people are less inclined to support advertising feeling that un-sponsored links represent a fairer viewpoint. 63% of links appearing at the top of search results get the majority of clicks. This demonstrates the importance of good search engine optimisation.

59.8% of men and 67.2% of women go on-line while they’re watching TV.

We humans are multi-tasking creatures. Have laptop will multi-task. How much is this driven by television advertising is not known or are we all looking up the biographies of the stars of the latest hit show?

China has the largest number of Internet users at 384 million.

Not bad for a country where democratic freedoms are limited. Yet plenty of sales opportunities do exist for the astute corporation.

Each of these has an impact if how we should be focusing many of our business development efforts.