Global Marketing News – 1st February 2016
Mobile trumps desktop in UK online retail
Research by SimilarWeb has revealed that a staggering 65% of UK online retail traffic came from mobile phones last year.
The sites with the biggest proportions of mobile visitors were the high street chains Argos, Boots and Next, which all had over 70% of their online visitors coming from mobiles.
The ecommerce sites eBay and Amazon also saw high levels of mobile traffic, with 59% and 64% respectively.
Mobile users spent less time on websites than desktop users, however, and visited fewer pages, a trend that was picked up on by SimilarWeb.
A spokesperson for the company said: “Retailers must continue to embrace the rapid change towards mobile, including better checkout flows, and integrations between desktop and mobile sites.”
The UK has a digital buyer penetration rate of 88.2%, the highest in the world.
In 2015, the B2C British ecommerce market was worth a staggering 123 billion US dollars.
Yahoo Japan under pressure to ban ivory sales
Yahoo Japan is facing growing pressure to change its policy on ivory sales on its ecommerce platform.
Ivory produced since 1989 is illegal, but Yahoo Japan permits the sale of older ivory that was produced before the 1989 treaty came into force.
Critics have said that this encourages present-day hunters to obtain ivory and pass it off as pre-1989 ivory, however, thereby fuelling the hunting of elephants and speeding up their extinction.
Over a million people have now signed an online petition asking Yahoo Japan to stop selling all ivory products on its ecommerce site.
A spokesperson from the company declined to say whether Yahoo Japan would change its policy on the sale of ivory on its platforms following the pressure, but did admit that change was a possibility.
Yahoo Japan is one of the most popular online portals in the country, with 88% of Japanese internet users using the site.
Facebook reveals spectacular growth
Facebook has revealed spectacular growth in its fourth quarter 2015 report.
The social media giant revealed that its quarterly profits hit 1.56 billion US dollars at the end of last year, more than double its profits in the previous quarter.
When looking at the whole of 2015, it made profits of almost 18 billion US dollars.
The number of users on the platform also hit a record high, of almost 1.6 billion people, strengthening Facebook’s title as the most popular social network in the world.
Of these, 80 million people used the low-data version Facebook Lite and 19 million used Internet.org.
The report also revealed that 50 million small businesses have a Facebook Page, of which 2.5 million advertised on the social network. 80% of Facebook’s advertising revenue in the last quarter came from mobile advertising.
Social media is most popular online activity in Latin America
Social media is the most popular online activity of internet users in Latin America, according to research by comScore.
The research revealed that Latin Americans spent 29% of their time online on social networking sites, more than any other activity. Portals and retail were the second and third most popular online activities respectively.
Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) came second in terms of social media consumption, with internet users in this region spending 22% of their time online on social media sites.
North America took third place and the Asia-Pacific region came fourth, with 14% and 8% respectively.
Online video advertising in China set to increase next year
And finally, research by Analysys International predicts that online video advertising in China will increase next year.
Digital video ad spend saw strong growth in 2015, reaching 24.3 billion yuan, equivalent to 3.9 billion US dollars, an increase of 43% on the previous year.
Mobile accounts for a significant chunk of this, making up 47% of all digital video ad spend.
Video advertising is expected to continue its growth this year, with it being set to increase by 50% to 36.5 billion yuan.
Webcertain’s global marketing news bulletins are daily 5-minute videos, providing marketers with the latest international digital marketing news in an easy-to-digest format.
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