Digital Marketing Stats 2022

by | Apr 8, 2022 | Blog

Marketing teams need to justify their expenses and strategy. They are asked to answer their ROI with data that proves traffic flows, improved leads and closed sales. In digital marketing, trends shift quickly. Knowing what is working, what is likely to continue to improve and what trends are starting to fade is essential to the success of your campaigns.

These are the statistics you need to know for 2022 that will help your marketing team lock-in strategies and secure leads.

Key Digital Marketing Statistics for 2022

These stats are from researchers who are interested in gathering data from the following impactful areas influencing digital marketing:

  • Data Quality
  • Search Engine Marketing
  • Pay-Per-Click Marketing
  • Customer Experience
  • Marketing Attribution
  • Marketing Analytics
  • Brand Marketing
  • Data-Driven Marketing
  • Social Media Marketing

Data Quality Statistics

High-quality data is crucial to your marketing and personalization strategy. Data is necessary to train AI and machine learning programs that support your marketing with targeted messages delivered in real-time.

  • 57 percent of marketers incorrectly interpret data and therefore, draw incorrect conclusions.
  • 47 percent of new data records have at least one critical error.
  • 54 percent of organizations say that data quality and completeness are their biggest hurdle with data-driven marketing.
  • 3 percent of executives said that their departmental data falls within the acceptable parameters of data quality control.
  • 37 percent of survey (Gartner) respondents said that the time spent manually collating data is a hindrance to marketing goal attainment.

Search Marketing Statistics

Search engines have become essential to our daily lives, so much so that ‘google’ is a verb. As a marketer, knowing how to optimize websites for SEO is just part of daily tasks. However, organic search is somewhat overlooked in the entering of keywords.

These statistics demonstrate the potential of marketing over SEO:

Organic Search

  • On average, Google processes more than 40,000 search queries every second, or over 3.5 billion searches every day.
  • 85.4 percent of internet users search for information online at least once per month.
  • Google owns about 92 percent of the global search engine market. Bing (2.75 percent) and Baidu (1.9 percent) follow.
  • More than 60 percent of Google searches originate from mobile devices
  • Bing processes 12 billion searches every month.
  • 38 percent of US-based Bing users have a household income of more than $100,000.
  • DuckDuckGo, a privacy-centred search engine, saw traffic increase by 107 percent between October 2019 and October 2021.

Mobile Search

  • It is estimated that 70 percent of US paid search impressions and clicks occur on mobile devices.
  • 92.3 percent of smartphone owners use their phones to search online.
  • Before buying in-store, 70 percent of smartphone owners use their device to conduct further research.

Online Shopping

  • 49 percent of product searches begin on Amazon, and 36 percent begin on Google.
  • Google Shopping ads account for 76 percent of retail search ad spend.

Local SEO

  • 28 percent of “nearby” or “near me” searches result in a purchase.
  • Online shoppers are 80 percent more likely to visit a brick-and-mortar store if they can check inventory online.
  • 88 percent of mobile users who search for a store on Google Maps visit a related store within a week – and 76% visit within a week.

Voice Search

  • 27 percent of the global online population uses mobile voice search.
  • 72 percent of people with a voice-activated speaker (e.g. Alexa, Google Home) say that they use it every day.
  • Experts estimate that this year, at least 50 percent of consumers will use voice search.

Customer Experience Statistics

Personalization has become central to marketing and targeting. Brands that can clearly identify their community and target their potential customers with personalized messaging are more likely to succeed in 2022.

  • 86 percent of consumers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.
  • 81 percent of marketers say they expect to be competing largely or entirely on the basis of customer experience in the next two years.
  • Two-thirds of marketers say they largely compete on the basis of customer experience.
  • 3 out of 4 CX leaders (75 percent) note that they have seen a positive correlation between customer satisfaction and business objectives.
  • Budgets for CX have risen since 2017 by 74 percent, according to industry experts.
  • Consumers are inclined to switch brands for greater personalized messaging, with 52 percent stating they would switch brands for targeted advertising.
  • 57 percent of consumers say they would switch to a competitor brand if they provided a better experience.
  • In the past year, there were 2.5 billion visits to Google Account pages to adjust ad personalization preferences.

Advanced Marketing Analytics Statistics

Investment in real-time analysis, AI, and automation tools has increased in recent years to keep pace with the demand for more personalized content and targeting from consumers.

  • The use of analytics in marketing reached 52.7 percent in 2020.
  • According to research, marketing leaders are more likely to emphasize these analytics tools and capabilities over industry conservatives:
    • Leaders are 2.3x as likely to leverage automation to manage campaign budgets and bids across multiple media channels in real-time.
    • Leaders are 53% more likely to trust that machine learning assists marketing teams in evaluating data to understand consumer intent.
    • Leaders are 1.5x as likely to apply their digital measurement learnings to digital campaigns and investments in real-time.
    • Leaders are 1.7x more likely to agree that the adoption of machine learning and automation improves targeting, spend optimization, and personalization.

However, analytics tools do not have all the answers. Investment in these tools could be outpacing those who are to most benefit from them.

  • Marketing teams struggle to demonstrate how these investments in analytics contribute to organizational success. 35 percent of marketers state they do not have the quantitative tools to demonstrate the impact of spending on company performance.

Marketing Attribution Statistics

Marketing teams find attributing specific engagement to purchases/conversions, and how specific touchpoints contribute to overall ROI difficult.

  • Most companies do not have access to quantitative metrics that prove the value of marketing spending.
  • 68 percent say improving the measurability of ROI is a priority for data-driven strategies.
  • 9 percent of marketers rate their company’s understanding of data-driven attribution as excellent. The ranking is as follows:
    • 29 percent – good.
    • 27 percent – neutral.
    • 22 percent – below average.
    • 12 percent – very poor.
  • 66 percent of marketers agree on the importance of data analytics and 63 percent agree that data literacy is important.
  • 44 percent of marketing professionals plan to implement multi-touch attribution in the next year.
  • In almost half of organizations (45 percent), data scientists are performing more basic tasks (including data visualization) than data analysis.
  • These positions are also difficult to fill, with over one-third of marketers (37 percent) citing data analysis as one of the hardest positions to recruit.
  • Over half of marketers do not trust their modelling techniques, showing there is a disconnect between where analytics teams are today and where they are trying to get to.
  • 1 in 4, or 26 percent, of marketing allocation, is spent on paid media.

Content Marketing Statistics

Content saturation is hitting consumers hard. Traffic is now seeking high-quality content from trusted sources and moving further away from unreliable sources.

Strategy

  • 63 percent of businesses don’t have a documented content strategy.
  • 86 percent of B2C marketers say content marketing is key to their strategy.
  • 72 percent of marketers believe that content marketing increases engagement and drives leads.

Blogging

  • 70 percent of organizations list blog content in their top 5 content channel strategies.
  • 41 percent of nurture campaigns feature thought leadership content in blog form.

Video

  • 31 percent of marketers use video messaging in nurture campaigns.
  • 82.8 percent of internet users view digital videos at least once per month.
  • Experts estimate that more than 1 million videos will be uploaded to the internet by the end of this year.

Podcasting & Webinars

  • Webinars are used in 48 percent of nurture campaigns.
  • 71.1 percent of internet users listen to digital audio content monthly.

Data-Driven Marketing Statistics

Data is key to making personalization the core of a marketing strategy. Companies are realizing the value in their data stores and mining it for greater value. Take the following for example:

  • Data-driven marketing is a priority for marketing leaders – 40 percent of organizations aim to increase data-driven marketing budgets, and 64 percent of marketing leaders report that data-driven strategies are vital in today’s economy. The top usages were:
    • A/B testing
    • Customer journey mapping/analysis
    • Segmentation
    • Website personalization
  • Data-driven marketing increases ROI, with campaigns that leverage data-driven personalization reporting 5-8x ROI for their campaign spend.
  • About 76 percent of marketers surveyed said that they base decisions on data analytics.
  • Marketing analytics is raking 16 percent of annual marketing budgets.
  • 32 percent of marketers identified marketing analytics and competitive insights as to the most important factors in supporting their marketing strategies over the past 18 months, ranking higher than any other category.
  • 37 percent of marketers say that proving their value is one of their top three biggest challenges.

Email Marketing Statistics

Email marketing remains one of the most important ways to connect with customers on a personal level, and is expected to play an essential role in a company’s ability to reconnect with customers as lockdowns lift worldwide.

  • Emails have a 50 to 100 times higher click-through rate when compared to Facebook and Twitter.
  • 78 percent of marketers say list segmentation is an essential marketing automation feature.
  • 90.9 percent of all internet users send an email at least once a month.
  • Nearly 50 percent of marketers plan to send more emails in the next 3-6 months.
  • Emails reach 85 percent of the people they are sent to and have an open rate of 22.86 percent and a click-through rate of 3.71 percent.

Social Media Marketing Statistics

Social media, despite many users finding better alternatives to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, remains a priority for marketers wanting to connect with communities.

  • Over 3.6 billion people used social media worldwide in 2021. That number is projected to increase to almost 4.41 billion by 2025.
  • 50 percent of nurture campaigns feature social media.
  • 97 percent of organizations use Facebook for content marketing.
  • 75 percent of B2B buyers and 84 percent of C-suite executives say they use social media to make purchasing decisions.
  • Millennials continue to drive social media usage with 90.4 percent of them active on social media in 2019, followed by 77.5 percent of Generation X, and 48.2 percent of Baby Boomers.
  • TikTok users engage 15 percent more often than users on other social media platforms.

Ecommerce Statistics

  • 65 percent of consumers check price comparison information for a product while shopping in-store, while 49 percent look at online reviews before making a purchase.
  • It is expected that mobile commerce will take an eCommerce market share of 72.9 percent by 2021.
  • eCommerce is expected to account for 17.5 percent of total global retail sales by 2021.
  • About 9 percent of people say they use voice technology to shop once a week or more frequently.
  • More than two-thirds of eCommerce website traffic comes from Google, with 43 percent coming from organic and 26 percent from CPC.

Paid Media Statistics

  • Google claims that for every $1 spent on Google Ads, businesses receive $8 profit.
  • Mobile devices account for 69 percent of all clicks on Google Ads.
  • Paid search represents about 39 percent of a business’s total marketing budget.
  • 58 percent of Millennials report making a purchase based on an online ad.
  • 28 percent of internet users say they’ve found new products or services through paid ads.
  • PPC ad spending is expected to exceed $258 billion in 2022.
  • 74 percent of brands cite PPC advertising as a primary business driver.
  • Voice-based ad revenues are expected to reach $19 billion this year.