The Chaffey Column - October 2009
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Internet Marketing Statistics for Marketers
I find there is great hunger amongst marketers and business owners to know "how do we compare?" against rivals and other companies in other sectors.
Many marketing professionals also want to review adoption of digital services and benchmark their performance against competitors.
To help, last month, I developed a comprehensive compilation of "Internet statistics sources":http://www.marketing-online.co.uk/wiki/Category:Internet_Statistics to answer this question.
Here are some of the main sources you may find useful:
1. "Conversion rates":http://www.marketing-online.co.uk/wiki/Ecommerce_Conversion_Rates_Statistics
Average conversion rates for E-commerce or online retail websites are highly sought after since companies are keen to benchmark their conversion performance against others in their sector. These are some of the best freely available sources. Remember to segment conversion by different visitor types or sources as shown by these statistics.
2. "Social media usage statistics":http://www.marketing-online.co.uk/wiki/Social_Media_Usage_Statistics
Each of the main social network presences give access to their own statistics on usage and consumer adoption. But first, these are the best overall compilations of global consumer social media usage across blogs, Facebook and Twitter by country.
3. "Email response statistics":http://www.marketing-online.co.uk/wiki/Email_Response_Statistics
Email marketers want to compare the performance of their campaigns in terms of open, clickthrough and delivery rates, ideally against competitors in the same industry sector. Benchmark compilations of email open and clickthrough are available from a range of Email Service Providers summarised on this page.
4. "Online advertising rate statistics":http://www.marketing-online.co.uk/wiki/Online_Advertising_Response_Statistics
Ad clickthrough rates from different European countries show a surprisingly low rate, but it does vary b different browser types.
5. "Web browser and plugin statistics":http://www.marketing-online.co.uk/wiki/Internet_Access_Device_Statistics
When doing a site redesign you need to know how many visitors to your site will use different browsers, screen resolutions and plugins such as different Flash versions. You can get this information from most web analytics systems like Google Analytics. But these figures provide an industry benchmark.
If there is any information not listed that you want to know I may know about it, so do drop me an email via my Marketing Insights company site if there are any other details you have been searching for.
About the author
Dr. Dave Chaffey, is the Director and lead consultant for Marketing Insights Ltd , an independent digital marketing consultancy.
He is the best selling author of several Internet Marketing books used by digital marketing professionals and on many University and College Courses globally. His latest book, Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice, now in its 4th edition,was published in January 2009.
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