Adobe’s yearly Digital Marketing Optimization Survey is as anxiously anticipated by many online marketers as Christmas morning is by children with visions of sugarplums (and iPads) in their eyes. In the years that Adobe has been publishing this authoritative resource, it has provided countless critical insights into the state of online marketing, and this year is certainly no exception with a wealth of key statistics which can help guide your campaign to ever higher engagement and metrics.

Statistics of significant interest to all online marketers

The 2014 version of the Adobe Digital Marketing Optimization Survey polled more than 1,000 brand executives from across North America, Europe, Africa, The Middle East, and Asia in a broad swath of organizations and industry sectors. The statistics which were generated by this comprehensive and up to the minute report are of significant interest to any online marketer anywhere. These findings include:

  • The average conversion rate is 2.6% but 20% of top brands obtain rates higher than 4.5%.
  • Automation increases brands’ average conversion rate from 2.6% to 3.6%.
  • Involving multiple departments in the optimization process boosts the average conversion rate from 2.6% to 4.3%.
  • Companies with a culture of optimization are able to double their conversion rate.
  • The companies which receive the highest conversion rates spend more than 5% of their total online marketing budgets on optimization.
  • The top converting companies are 43% more likely to use a broad range of targeting techniques.
  • 75% of respondents claim that personalization is critical to their brands’ long term goals.
  • 89% of all companies acknowledge that the use of customer behavior data for targeting purposes is increasing.
  • Companies which are quantifying the improvement in the context of online sales or key website performance metrics via the personalization of their online experiences gain 19% more sales.
  • 70% of all brands which have adopted testing are in the top 20%, while the bottom 80% includes the 54% which do not test.
  • 91% of all brands who consider that focusing on mobile is critical to their cross-channel efforts are in the top 20%, while the bottom 80% includes the 33% who don’t consider mobile to be important.
  • Mobile customers spend 400% longer in a tablet app and 250% longer in a smartphone app than on a website on the identical device.
  • Global app downloads are on track to hit 300 billion (about 50 apps for every man, woman, and child on Earth) by 2016.

These figures are well worth studying and analyzing in depth, as although cumulative results are not ever precisely linear, you can make a case that if you involve multiple departments and automate extensively, your average conversion rate could actually be boosted from 2.6% to 5.3%!

The top 15 techniques utilized by top performing brands

Top performing brands agree on the importance of various customer experience measurement and optimization tactics, stating that the top 15 techniques they rely on include:

  1. Website analytics – 89%
  2. Social media analytics – 53%
  3. Social sharing (icons on pages) – 47%
  4. Email optimization – 43%
  5. Customer reviews – 42%
  6. Mobile analytics – 40%
  7. A/B testing – 39%
  8. Onsite search – 33%
  9. Profile targeting – 31%
  10. Retargeting or remarketing – 29%
  11. Audience segmentation – 26%
  12. Onsite survey – 20%
  13. Multivariate testing – 17%
  14. Attribution modeling – 15%
  15. Automated recommendations – 13%

Key takeaways on boosting your online marketing campaign results

Some of the key conclusions that can be derived from these statistics for online marketers include:

  • Determine your Key Performance Indicators quickly and rely upon them
  • Let your clean and consistent data dictate your brand’s marketing priorities
  • To benefit in the relationship-driven era of online marketing create unique, organic, and fully content-driven experiences
  • Automate your efforts to ensure the greatest real time efficiencies
  • Invest more in order to generate greater conversion rates
  • Enhance your mobile e-commerce with geolocation data to serve up relevant location-based offerings
  • You can never test, optimize and personalize too much!

The extent and type of data which is included in Adobe’s 2014 Survey is meticulously collected and unwaveringly applied to logically and verifiably support these stated conclusions. The study is a treasure trove for all online marketers.

Author Bio:

by Hal Licino

Hal Licino is a leading blogger on HubPages, one of the Alexa Top 120 websites in the USA. Hal has written 2,500 HubPage articles on a wide range of topics, some of which have attracted upwards of 135,000 page views a day. His blogs are influential to the point where Hal single-handedly forced Apple to retract a national network iPhone TV commercial and has even mythbusted one of the Mythbusters. He has also written for major sites as Tripology, WebTVWire, and TripScoop.