Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing Facts

On a typical day, Americans spend an average of 24 minutes purchasing good and services. This doesn’t include travel time. These 24 minutes are more than people spend relaxing and thinking (19 minutes on average) and about half the time people spend socializing and communicating with other people (46 minutes).

How much of that shopping time is spent online? Pew Internet & American Life Project released an online shopping study that tells us that American internet users have embraced online shopping – it’s convenient and a time-saver. However, the study also shows that online Americans also have high levels of concern about sending personal or credit card information over the Internet. Two-thirds (66%) of online Americans have purchased a product online, such as a book, toy, music or clothing. For those online Americans with household incomes greater than $100K, 32% say that the internet is the best place to buy items that are hard to find; 26% of those with household incomes less that $25K agree.

Several fact-packs and fact-books have recently been released online. The Pew study of online shopping is available at: http://www.pewinternet.org

The ninth edition of the Digital Economy Fact Book, recently released by The Progress & Freedom Foundation is available at:
http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/books/factbook_2007.pdf This fact book provides a factual basis from which to analyze the digital economy. The fact book includes best available information on the growth of the internet, the hardware sector, the communications sector, digital media, electronic commerce, threats to the digital economy, and the worldwide digital economy.

In addition to these fact books, Advertising Age carries it supplement, Search Marketing Fact Pack 2007, online (download at: http://adage.com/images/random/datacenter/2007/searchfactpack2007.pdf). Contents include interactive channels that marketers use, the top search engines, top terms and the leading sites by category, and things to watch in 2008.

Advertising Age’s other important fact book is the Digital Marketing and Media Fact Pack (download at: http://adage.com/images/random/digitalfactpack2007.pdf). Like the Search Marketing fact book, Digital Marketing and Media serves as a guide to marketing in this space. One fact: After breaking onto the scene a few years ago, social marketing is booming. MySpace and Facebook continue to defy gravity, growing 72.5% and 59.2% respectively, and depending on what surveys you use, advertisers are set to spend between 4.7% and 7.7% of their online ad budgets on the space (2007 numbers).

For more studies, contact your business librarian – these are all available online. For Fort Collins library users, go to http://library.fcgov.com/adult/business/ and check out other business resources online and in the library.