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We all love a good statistic don’t we? As marketers, there’s nothing better than diving into some of the latest statistics that relate to the very industry we work in.
What follows as an extensive, ever-updated and always expanding guide to digital marketing statistics in 2022.
You can find statistics type by section, or just browse the list in its entirety.
Digital marketing spend is set to exceed $615bn in 2022
Statista, 2022
78% of businesses are projected to invest in digital over print media
Smart Insights
69% of all advertising spend is projected to be generated via mobile devices by 2027
Statista, 2022
Over 70% of marketers have claimed to increase their companies image (digital reputation) with digital marketing
Content Marketing Institute, 2020
Video and events are expected to be the top digital forms of content-marketing investment in 2022
Content Marketing Institute, 2022
58.5% of internet users surveyed by Hootsuite (2022) said they purchased at least one product online each week. Free delivery was the top purchase driver.
Hootsuite, 2022
First page ranking is important: A massive 75% of internet users never get past the first page of search engine results, highlighting the importance of ranking in the top ten results.
SEO leads to sales rate: A significant 14.6% of people who visit sites as a result of organic search engine optimization lead to a sale. When compared to the 1.7% conversion rate of outbound methods like email, this is even more noteworthy.
Average first page Google article length: The average length of articles that achieve first page ranking on Google is 1,890 words. Search Engine Journal came up with this figure after analyzing 1 million Google results, proving that the sweet spot is around 2000 words.
Organic web traffic: A massive 53% of website traffic originates in an organic search. With just 10% coming from paid search, this shows the importance of achieving a high Google ranking via organic means.
Google market share: While everyone knows that Google is the dominant search engine, a lot of people will still be surprised to hear that they control a massive 86.6% of the global search engine market share. With Bing coming in second at 6.7%, it shows that all your efforts should be focused on ranking high on Google.
Google keeps growing: While Google already enjoys internet dominance, its growth doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. Year on year, it grows by between 10 and 15%. While that’s a lot slower than the 17,000% increase between 1998-1999, it’s still highly significant.
Shopping and Google Maps: A huge 86% of shoppers in the modern age look up the location of the business they’re about to visit on Google Maps. This definitely illustrates the importance of working on your local SEO.
Mobile vs Desktop: Since 2015, mobile searches have exceeded those from PC in number. Mobile dominance has only continued since then, highlighting the importance of optimizing your site for mobile as well as desktop.
Global email users: Email is still one of the globally dominant forms of communication, with around 4.3 billion users worldwide in 2022. The statistic for users in the modern world is likely closer to 100%, highlighting the almost endless outreach opportunities.
Email ROI: When it comes to marketing, you want to choose a method that enjoys a high return on investment. For every $1 spent on email marketing, businesses achieve an average return of $42; this is a massive statistic that shows the pure efficacy of email marketing.
Effect of email marketing on growth: Email marketing is massively effective when it comes to helping businesses achieve growth, one of the key objectives of any form of marketing. Around 81% of small to medium businesses find that email is their primary method of acquiring new customers, with 80% using it as a means of customer retention.
The power of personalisation: Personalisation results in a significant increase in the effectiveness of email marketing. While the average open rate of email marketing is 20.81%, that increases by around 50% when you add a personalized subject line.
User engagement leads to more clicks: The goal with email marketing isn’t just that someone reads the contents and then moves on - you ideally want the recipient to click on a link and convert to a sale. Simply adding a video to your email can improve click through rates by an astonishing 300%.
Marketers love emails: As a result of all those promising stats we’ve covered so far, it shouldn’t be surprising that marketers absolutely love email as a form of content distribution, with 87% of marketers stating that it’s their second favorite method of distribution behind social media.
Emails per day: Finally, an absolutely astonishing number of emails, 332.2 billion, are expected to be sent and received each day of 2022. That’s expected to go up to more than 375 billion in the next three years, showing that it’s absolutely not too late to tap into the email marketing niche.
Small businesses and mobile apps: Mobile apps are no longer something reserved for only massive businesses - around 32% of small businesses have an app already, with 42% of small businesses planning on developing one at some time in the future.
Responsive design is important: If we’re going to value anyone’s opinion when it comes to web design, it should be web designers themselves. According to 73% of them, a non-responsive website is the top reason behind why people leave a website.
Simplicity is key: While simplicity is one of the staples underpinning most design philosophies, it’s still something that a lot of people need to learn, with 84.6% of web designers stating that overcrowding is the most common small businesses make in their website design.
Getting the color right: While color choice might seem like a relatively unimportant factor when it comes to website design, a 2021 survey found that 39% of consumers appreciated color choice more than any other part of a website’s design, showing that it’s important to get it just right.
Retail and mobile: Just under 54% of all retail e-commerce in 2021 was generated via mobile. This shows that not only is mobile dominant in terms of mobile traffic, it’s also dominant when it comes to sales.
Focus on layout: While UX is a hot topic at the moment among web designers, it might be surprising for some to find out that when first coming across a website, 38% of consumers examine the layout and links on a page. If they find it confusing, they may leave to find another site.
A website needs to work well: While looks are important, a crucial element of web design is functionality. 42% of visitors will leave a site if they consider the functionality to be poor, showing that you need to focus on making things work as intended.
Web design market worth: Web design is a growing market that’s already worth $40.8 billion in the US alone, with an average growth rate of 4.4% per year since 2016.
COVID-19 and consumer expectations: A highly significant 68% of consumers have stated that their expectations when it comes to the capabilities of businesses’ digital capabilities have increased since the beginning of the pandemic. This shows just how far reaching the impact of digitisation has been, ranging from remote working to a higher focus on UX.
Web developers in the US: There are currently a massive 179,000 web developers and designers working in the US alone. That number is expected to rise to 205,000 by 2030.
Web developers in the world: There are currently a massive 27 million web developers working globally. The industry is growing at a rapid pace, and that number is predicted to rise to 45 million by 2030.
DIY web development: The market for DIY web development platforms that allows relative novices to create their own website is currently $24 billion in the US. The market is experiencing a significant 4.9% growth each year.
Don’t waste people's time: People expect fast response times from their website experiences. 48% of internet browsers find that unresponsive websites make them feel frustrated and angry, while 36% consider spending time on such websites a waste of time.
Number of websites in the world: While the number is constantly increasing, there are over 200 billion websites currently in existence in the world. That statistic can be potentially misleading however, as only 400 million of those websites are currently active.
The number of websites is growing: While there are already an astronomical number of websites on the internet, that number is growing at around 380 sites per minute. That means a whopping 547,000 websites enter existence each day, on average.
Ad blockers are becoming less popular: For those looking to pursue paid media strategies, there’s good news - ad blockers are becoming less popular. From 2016 to 2020, the percentage of people who used ad blockers dropped from 52% to 41%.
Mobile browsers and ad blocking: Unfortunately, while the intentional usage of ad blockers is declining in popularity, a lot of mobile browsers block ads by default; around 527 million internet browsers were thought to use such browsers in 2019, and that number has likely increased by now.
Digital marketing is growing - fast: The global digital marketing and advertising market is growing at a rapid rate; estimates placed its value at $350 billion in 2020 - in 2022 it’s worth $460 billion in the United States alone, with predictions placing global marketing at around $786 billion by the year 2026.
Advertising is turning digital: While this might come as no surprise, advertising is now predominantly digital, with 55% of all advertising currently happening online.
Targeted advertising works: Among advertising professionals, the top methods used to increase optimisation include ad placement and audience targeting.
It’s not all SEO nowadays: While SEO is incredibly important, 68% of marketing professionals stated that they considered paid media “extremely important” or “very important” when it came to their overall approach to marketing strategy.
Mobile advertising growth is high but slowing: While mobile advertising is a field that has experienced rapid growth in recent years, it’s expected that by the end of 2022, growth will have slowed down to 10.4% per year.
Video advertising helps people: A massive 94% of consumers said that they watched videos to help them understand more about products before buying them, with a further 84% stating that the video would sway them to buy that product.
The word “because” is magic: People need a reason to do something - including the word “because” in your call to action can increase its efficacy from 60% to a whopping 94%.
Shorter email subjects are better: People need to have their attention caught instantly - there are so many distractions online that it’s impossible to pay attention to everything. This means that the perfect length for an email subject is a mere 28 to 39 characters - use them wisely!
Attention to detail: The little mistakes on a website can make a big difference. 59% of internet browsers said that obvious mistakes in grammar or spelling would sway them away from patronizing a business.
CTA vs sources: While sources do help to provide an article with an increased sense of legitimacy, it’s far more important to have a call to action (CTA). In fact, having a clearly actionable CTA is 202% more effective in copywriting than including one source.
Copywriters are self employed: While not all copywriters are self employed, a significant 73% identify as such. Of that percentage, 6% have marketing agencies, while the remaining 67% are freelance.
Headlines are important: A significant 80% of those on the internet read the headline of a piece of copy they come across, while only 20% go on to read the body. It’s essentially down to the headline to persuade those readers to carry on, and often the headline doesn’t do a good enough job.
People skim: Most internet readers don’t read through every word of the content they read - a significant majority of 73% just skim read. To accommodate them, make it easier by highlighting keywords and phrases, and using a simple structure.
It’s a growing industry: In the next decade alone, there will likely be a need for another 14,300 copywriters, taking into account those who are also leaving the industry.
What’s the Metaverse?: A significant majority of adult Americans still didn’t know what the Metaverse was in late 2021, with 38% of those asked stating that they had never heard of it.
Lack of consumer enthusiasm: It may take a while for the general public to warm to the idea of VR and the Metaverse, with 68% of American adults stating that they weren’t interested in the project.
The issue of user experience: 32% of XR industry specialists believe that the biggest thing holding back adoption of augmented reality on a mass scale is a lack of user experience.
Content is lacking: While user experience poses an issue, so does AR specific content, with 18% of XR industry experts surveyed responding that it’s the biggest issue.
AR user numbers are rising: While there were just 200 million AR users in 2015, that number is set to rise to 1.7 billion by 2024. This is great news for the Metaverse.
Big money is involved already: The market cap of the web 2.0 companies involved with Metaverse is 14.8tn, more than the GDP of most countries.
Broadening horizons: The main reason that US internet users cited they’d join the Metaverse is to experience things that they couldn’t otherwise experience in the physical world.
Businesses are getting ready: By 2026, it’s estimated that 30% of all organizations will have services and products ready for the Metaverse, with more following suite in the following years.
Data Sources
https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/digital-advertising/worldwide
https://www.statista.com/statistics/237974/online-advertising-spending-worldwide/
https://www.statista.com/outlook/digital-markets
https://www.smartinsights.com/advicetype/digital-marketing-statistics/
https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/copywriter/job-market/
https://offers.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics-report
https://www.procopywriters.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/ProCopywriters-Survey-2020.pdf
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/10-copywriting-statistics-you-need-know-lisa-taylor
https://www.winterberrygroup.com/news-posts/47bprqaro8tlecx155d8gpmhy3hpvs
https://www.statista.com/topics/4317/marketing-technology/
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-guide/seo-statistics/
