If you ever wonder if your own marketing practices match up with what the best in the industry are doing, Adobe Systems Inc.’s annual Digital Index “Best of the Best” report is a perfect opportunity to find out.
Released this past week at Adobe Summit, the report is generated thanks to anonymous user data of Adobe’s ever-growing Marketing Cloud product suite. Made up of applications such as Adobe Target, Analytics, Experience Manager, Media Optimizer, Campaign, etc. the software counts 30.4 trillion transactions per year, according to the Mountain View, Calif.-based firm. It’s used by the majority of Fortune 500 companies and eight out of the 10 largest agencies in the world. That’s a huge sample size – so comparing your own marketing practices against the top performers in this aggregate data will give you a realistic view of whether you’re heading in the right direction.
Here’s a few highlights from the report as shared by Adobe’s CMO.com:
- Almost every industry, except for high-tech, is seeing better click-through-rates on online ads. Adobe attributes this to an increase in the use of programmatic buying, automating the delivery of ads to the most desired audience.
- Overall the amount of time spent on websites is going down. Why? Because more people are visiting websites on smartphones, where they typically inclined to spend less time per session. Retail is the only sector that actually saw an increase in time spent for the past year, likely because many players have focused on making the mobile experience a good one.
- Also down are the average number of visits per visitor. In other words, most brands aren’t doing a good job of compelling people to return to their websites. Adobe says this shows the need to develop loyalty and retention programs.
Digital marketing is mobile marketing
After years of the industry talking about the importance of a “mobile first” approach and implementing responsive or reflexive design on websites, the statistics are demonstrating that is indeed the case. Those spending more time on improving the mobile experience are benefitting and pulling ahead of the pack when it comes to engaging visitors on digital platforms. Take a gander at Adobe’s slides on its data to glean some best practices for your own marketing mix:
