10 interesting digital marketing stats from this week

Top five digital agencies drive growth

Econsultancy’s Top 100 Digital Agencies report has revealed an increase of 20% in total fee income from the top 10 agencies over the past year, surpassing £2bn.

The five biggest-earning agencies accounted for 34% of the entire Top 100 income this year.

Brexit breeds memes

Hitwise has done a bit of digging into the online behaviors of the British public post-Brexit.

• On the Friday of the result, searches for meme generators were up 300% from the previous Friday.
• One in 85 image searches were for either Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson.
• 55% of those searching for ‘images’, ‘memes’ or ‘gifs’ following the result of the Referendum were 18–34 year olds.

40% of companies are planning to use predictive analytics this year

Econsultancy’s new Predictive Analytics report, in association with RedEye, reveals the following findings (amongst others).

• 40% of companies are either using, currently implementing or budgeting for predictive analytics over the next 12 months.
• 53% of companies with this capability reported a significant increase in sales.
• 45% of marketers cite disparate tech platforms while 39% rated business culture as key barriers to predictive analytics success.  
• 99% of companies agree that the use of predictive analytics will be important for the future of their organisation.

A third of office employees have walked in on embarrassing situations at work

This isn’t really related to digital marketing (though I’m sure many of you can relate).

I thought I’d include it anyway, the result of a survey by Kit Out My Office, for a larf.

Eyetracking reveals in-article video ads trump social ads

Teads has revealed some results from its eye-tracking tests with users.

Native video ads on publisher websites are seen more often than social video ads.

Sales on Brexit morning were much higher than usual

MyThings, an ad tech company, has studied its own sales data to reveal any ecommerce fallout from the British vote to leave the EU.

The results show uncertainty, but no big effects yet, aside from in financial services.

Here are some of the most interesting findings.

• Sales during the early hours of 24th June were much higher than usual, with many staying up to watch the results come in live.
• But as the decision of the referendum became clear, retail spending plummeted for several hours.
• Financial services (-73.8%) saw the biggest drop of all retail categories, unsurprising given the volatile state of the financial markets in the hours following Brexit.
• UK sales among overseas consumers rose in the three-day period following Brexit, although modestly.

Ocado profits are up

Great news for Ocado, which reported a 5.7% rise in its first-half core earnings ($53.6m in the six months to May 15th).

Amazon Fresh has entered the UK market but is still feeling its way, with some reporting a vastly inferior UX to Ocado. No doubt the gap will close soon.

Video on demand – streaming bigger than DVDs in US, but not UK

Strategy Analytics recently published some findings about the size of the streaming, download and DVD markets in the US and the UK.

As you can see from the charts below, streaming is the biggest part of the market in the US, whereas DVD purchases comfortably lead in the UK.

More on these trends from Luke Richards.

Seasonal trends in ecommerce

It’s always fun to look at search stats from our friends at eBay, to see how ecommerce is affected by external factors.

Searches for ‘sun lounger’ shot up by 71% in the first week of July last year compared to the week before, as temperatures soared to well over 30°C in some parts of the country.

Unsurprisingly, that heatwave also triggered a spike in searches for ‘sunglasses’ during the week, up a fifth (20%) from the week before.

I’m not sure UK weather did the same for eBay’s sunglasses sales over the past couple of weeks. I’ve personally been searching for ‘affordable one-man submarine’.

Wearable shipments to double by 2020

International Data Corporation (IDC) expects global shipments of wearable devices to double to more than 213m units in 2020.

Clothing will account for 7.3% of the market by 2020. Elsewhere, despite a lukewarm reception thus far, smartwatches are expected to overtake wristbands.