I love ComScore, the data they provide me as a digital marketing strategist and how they share their information in such a non-fuss, straight-forward way. I’m a big fan and I’ve blogged often using their data for evidence and today is no exception.

 

I’ll keep it brief because really you should just click through and read their summary of the Top 10 Burning Issues in Digital. From my vantage point of view, there’s nothing there that I didn’t know and for non-digital marketing folk reading this for insight, there won’t be too many surprises for you either (eCommerce upward trend, Social Media, Smartphone & Tablets). However, I was interested to see that in the US, online retail spending (excluding Travel – which has the lions share at 34% of total online eCommerce sales) is still only 10% of total retail sales. I would have thought we had broken through this barrier by now.

 

Australia’s eCommerce habits

I struggled to find an Australian figure to match. It was 5% in 2010 but that didn’t include overseas retailers (which is my family is anything to go by, excludes the majority of online ecommerce sales in Australia as apart from Apple and the occasional obscure item, I buy all my music, books etc online from Book Depository or Amazon as its cheaper and I can get free shipping for larger orders). I did find a report from PwC in July 2012 about online spending in Australia that support my personal views, confirming that 45% of Australians online spending is on overseas websites “Offshore online shopping has increased by 20 per cent in the last year to $7.2 billion, and represents 45 per cent of Australia’s total online shopping spend”.

 

Digital tracking to determine which channel delivers the most leads

ComScore’s Top 10 Digital Issues report also touched on an important element about multi-channel shopping – which in my experience, most of my clients and the people I talk to, like to give lip-service to but are not seriously interested in investing in the type of tracking configuration and reporting that they need to do to properly monitor each channel and the leads to sales that it is generating. The last click attribution (assuming that if a sale came through paid search, that more budget should be put to paid search when it might have been TV or radio that drove the person to search to look for your product or brand) is still standard and most businesses transaction online aren’t taking the time to determine which channel is driving the consideration of the product or brand, only focusing on where the conversions come through.

 

And I said I would keep this brief. oops 🙂

How Big Data is changing human behaviour (& our opportunity to access information)

I will finish by copying some of ComScores interesting Big Data facts as I think this illustrates just how fast the digital industry is growing now and how hard it is to accurately predict any of the new innovation that might come in the next year or two and when consumers will pick it up.

  • Today’s (2012) smartphone would have been the most powerful computer in the world in 1985
  • 120 million people in the U.S. now own smartphones, up 30 million in just the past year
  • For $600 you can buy a disk that can store all of the world’s music
  • 30+ billion pieces of data are added to Facebook every month
  • 72 hours of video are added to YouTube every minute
  • By the end of 2012, comScore was capturing 1.4 trillion digital interactions per month
  • 92% of the world’s data was created in just the past two years. WOW!!!!