It’s hard to believe we’re already past the halfway mark for 2014. Yes I’m a little bit late writing this as we’re into August but hey – July is, and was, a busy month! It’s been a crazy year so far for many reasons, and there are more photos of cats online than ever, but with so much going on it’s easy to forget what we’ve seen online. So here we have kindly rounded up what’s been big in the world of digital for 2014 Q1.
We’ve got statistics, graphs, percentages, and of course we’ve thrown in a few World Cup numbers for good measure.
2014 Brazil World Cup
- With 35.6 million tweets, Brazil vs Germany is the most-discussed single sports game ever on Twitter
- The World Cup Final came close with 35.1 million tweets, before that the most tweeted about event was the Superbowl in 2013 that saw 24.9 million tweets
- The ‘most tweets per minute’ record came during the World Cup Final, with 618,725 tweets being posted per minute
- 1 billion Facebook posts, comments and likes relating to the World Cup between 12 – 29 June, which reached 3 billion interactions by the end of the World Cup
Most searched for football players during the World Cup:
- Neymar Jr
- Ronaldo
- Messi
Most searched for goals:
- RVP ‘superman’ flying header
- Messi scoring against Iran
- Rodriquez against Uruguay
For me there are no big surprises here. THAT Van Persie goal was incredible, and Neymar was like a God amongst men – until he sustained a back injury and missed probably the most important, and memorable, Brazil game of the competition…
As for the activity online, those numbers are huge. 618, 725 World Cup tweets per minute during the final – that breaks down to 10,312 per second. Yes there are a lot of people on the planet who are interested in football, but 10,312 tweets per second is still a massive amount of content being thrown onto Twitter.
PPC
Some people know what it is, others don’t and there are lots that think they might know what it is, but essentially PPC is an effective tool that made Google £6,109,378,312 in revenue from ads on its own sites alone in 2014 Q1 so it’s kind of a big deal.
For those who don’t know what PPC is it stands for ‘Pay Per Click’ which is a form online advertising to try and direct traffic to websites. For example; you own a website and another website owner (the publisher) has agreed to display one of your adverts or banners on their website to generate traffic to your site. You would pay the publisher for each click you get through to your website. Here you can see examples of PPC on Google:
When eConsultancy surveyed more than 2,000 people on their use of PPC adverts:
- 35.15% said that they clicked on PPC adverts “not very often at all”
- 29.04% of respondents said they often clicked on Google Search adverts, or clicked when they saw something interesting
- 65% of people who clicked PPC in 2013 were 35 years or older
- 10% of respondents said they had never seen an ad on Google, with a further 25% admit they had seen them but never clicked one
- Least likely to click ads often were the 18-24 year olds
On top of this 50% of people arriving at a retailers site from paid ads are more likely to buy than those who came from an organic link:
In one minute on Facebook:
- 323 days of YouTube videos are viewed
- 500 new accounts are created (30,000 per hour)
- £6,828 is made
- 3.3 million items shared
- 416 logins are compromised
The numbers above clearly show that no matter how many people claim that they are “going off Facebook for a while” and will “only be contactable via phone”, it’s still an incredibly busy platform that will be around for a while yet.
Web and Design
Now being a web design agency (only a small part of our skill set!) of course we need to include some stats on this topic. These numbers come from a report by Ironpaper from March this year so they’re pretty recent figures. I am not at all surprised by the first point.
- 94% of people cited web design as the reason they mistrusted or rejected a website or company
- 72% of people entrusted online reviews just as much as personal recommendations
- 40% of people ventured away from a website if it took long than 3 seconds to load
- 67% of shoppers were more likely to buy from a website that is compatible with mobile devices
- 62% of companies that designed their website for mobile platforms saw their sales increase
How often have you visited a website and been put off by it looking unprofessional or worse – untrustworthy? It’s so incredibly important to have a website that reflects your brand, and if you want people to invest interest and money in your business you need to invest money and time into your website. If you’re currently not investing any money or time into your site, just do a little research online and really understand what you could gain from a little website TLC.
My Favourites
And finally here are some of my favourite findings from this year. They may have been around since before 2014 but I feel that they’re worth a mention after coming to light a little more this year.
#AmazonBasket
I love this. I know it’s not necessarily filling a gap but it’s a quirky little idea and I can imagine shopping being more like this in the future. You’ll learn more from watching the video, but essentially you link your Twitter and Amazon accounts, and if someone posts a tweet that includes an Amazon product link, you can reply with a tweet containing #AmazonBasket (or #AmazonCart in the US) and it’s automatically added to your Amazon basket. Is it needed? Debatable. But it’s different and I’d like to see how this evolves.
PS – You can read more about it here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/socialmedia/amazoncart
Pizza Express emails
Confession: I’ve only ever been to Pizza Express twice. But I’ve read and enjoyed their emails many times because they do such a good job. They’re charismatic, well designed, and above all they make good use of pixel art which is great to see. For those of you they aren’t familiar with pixel art, it’s where the email is designed in such a way that even when images in the inbox are turned off there is still a graphic made up by cleverly placed pixels.
The other tool they make use of is Echograph. This is a way around having moving GIFs in your emails which are not supported in some browsers. If you take a look at their blog you can see some great examples of how others have used this great tool. You can see an example here:
Scrolling Websites
I know they’re not new to 2014, but scrolling websites have certainly risen in popularity. To create or improve the customer journey they’re great, and you can be as adventurous as you like with the design. I’m seeing more and more parallax scrolling websites online with some very original twists, and here are some of my favourites:
http://poppyspend.britishlegion.org.uk
The last one is a personal favourite of mine. It’s a smooth, beautifully well-designed website and I just want to keep scrolling all day! We offer services in everything from design and print, to social media management and marketing, to advertising and SEO.
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