In a new report from Gartner, the only global market to experience mobile phone sales growth during Q1 2013 was the Asia/Pacific region, demonstrating a 6.4 percent increase year-on-year. This growth rate accounted for a 53.1 percent year-on-year increase in Asia/Pacific's share of mobile phones globally. China witnessed a 7.5 percent increase last quarter compared to Q1 2012, and accounted for 25.7 percent of all global mobile phone sales. "The Chinese and local manufacturers have been exemplary at addressing the demands of buyers by offering affordable devices with optimum features," claim [...]

Related Topics: Apple: iPhone | Channel: Mobile Marketing | Mobile Marketing | Samsung | Statistics: General | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Popularity & Usage

[caption id="attachment_37768" align="alignright" width="300"] Image via Shutterstock[/caption] Often, you want to look at your metrics over a longer time period than usual in order to identify long-term trends. This is especially true if your metrics are "jagged" and move around a lot. You have two choices: You could use a larger time period. If you usually watch daily metrics, switch to weekly. Or monthly. Or quarterly. This will smooth out your data and will also smooth out directional trends emerging from your data right at the time when you want to catch such changes. You could u [...]

Related Topics: Analytics | Analytics & Marketing Column | Channel: Analytics | Statistics: General

According to a new report from comScore, retail e-commerce spending reached $50.2 billion for the first quarter of 2013, surpassing the $50 billion mark for the second consecutive quarter on record after reaching $56 billion in Q4 2012. This is the fourteenth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth and tenth consecutive quarter to earn double-digit growth, with sales up 13 percent for Q1 2013. While still strong, last quarter's 13 percent growth rate was slightly less than growth during previous quarters. "One potential explanation for this mild deceleration is the payroll tax increase [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | E-Commerce | Statistics | Statistics: General | Statistics: Online Behavior

It may not sound like much for a site with more than a billion users and 751 million mobile active users, but a million downloads of Facebook Home is significant. Facebook revealed the figure at a "whiteboard session" held yesterday at the company's Menlo Park, California headquarters. Home had 500,000 downloads as of April 21. So the number has doubled in a few weeks. Facebook also said the profile of users adopting Home was becoming "more normal" with each passing week. (It's not clear what "less normal" would mean in this context.) The Facebook Home app/launcher has been heavily malig [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Home | Facebook: Mobile | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Top News

Social media metrics firm Unmetric evaluated over 5,000 branded Pinterest pages to determine which brands are leading on the social networking site built on images. The data gathered spanned from all time up until March 14, 2013 to identify the top five brands in five different categories: most followers, most comments, most likes, most pins and most repins. Of all the brands succeeding on Pinterest, Better Homes and Gardens made the most appearances, showing up in three of the five categories. The report revealed that brands with fashion, recipe, home and wedding boards score the highest a [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Marketing Tools: Analytics | Pinterest | Pinterest: Analytics | Pinterest: Business Use & Advertising | Pinterest: Statistics | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Online Behavior | Statistics: Social Media

If you're a retailer or an agency serving retailers, mobile is arguably now your most critical channel. Yet, despite the mounting evidence of consumer reliance on mobile devices in shopping, a majority of retailers still have "experimental" or very tepid mobile strategies. Considerable research has already established that smartphone owners use their devices heavily during offline shopping and "pre-shopping" activities. Now, Google is out with new sponsored research that reinforces the message and adds a few new insights. The study's insights come through both surveys and observation. Th [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile Marketing | Google: Mobile | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Online Behavior | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Top News

To celebrate its 10th birthday, LinkedIn has created an infographic with interesting stats about the service, including membership growth by year, by country, and the most popular company pages. Want the infographic for yourself? You'll find it here: LinkedIn Celebrates 10 years of Brand Relationships. LinkedIn also created an interactive "gallery" timeline that offers a brief history of the service. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Infographics | LinkedIn | Statistics: Social Media

WordPress continues to gain in popularity among top blog publishers. The blogging platform's market share rose to 52 percent, up from 48 percent last year, according to Royal Pingdom, which uses the Technorati Top 100 blogs list for its annual study. To get a sense of WordPress' growth trend, in Royal Pingdom's first study in 2009, they found WordPress was the blogging platform of choice on 32 percent of the top 100 blogs -- that's a 63% increase in five years, while no other platform has been able to increase share in a meaningful way. According to WordPress's own stats, there are over 6 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Top News

Is Google simply trying to create a better user experience on the iPhone and iPad or is it trying to "colonize" iOS with its apps? It all depends on your point of view -- though, it's probably a bit of both. When the new Gmail app for iOS was released May 6, immediately, inflammatory headlines appeared, suggesting that Google was "taking over the iPhone." However, that's not exactly the case. Users of the new Gmail app have the (default) option to go directly to the native versions of YouTube and Google Maps, as well as open Chrome via links in email. Previously, such links would have op [...]

Related Topics: Apple | Apple: iOS | Apple: iPhone | Apple: Safari | Channel: Industry | Google: Android | Google: Chrome | Google: Gmail | Google: Maps | Google: Mobile | Google: YouTube | Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Top News

Today, native advertising company Sharethrough announced the launch of Sharethrough Mobile, a platform that allows advertisers to promote branded content through native ads across mobile devices. Sharethrough uses proprietary technology called Real Time Templating (RTT) that enables the platform to identify the style elements of any webpage and match the look of each individual ad to that environment. RTT also adapts to any future style updates publishers make to their templates so ads stay consistent with the new elements. Below are examples of how Sharethough mobile ads appear across d [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Content Marketing | Display Advertising | Internet Marketing Industry: Stats | Mobile Marketing | Social Media Marketing: Advertising | Statistics: Online Advertising | Top News

Local mobile ad network xAd has released its Q1 insights report. Like other such reports now in the market, it surveys trends and year-over-year changes observed on its ad network. This comes on the heels of xAd's co-sponsored "Mobile Path to Purchase" report (with Telmetrics), based on Nielsen data. That report had some truly striking findings. Chief among them: 46 percent of survey respondents said they relied exclusively on their mobile devices to conduct online research across a range of purchase categories. In other words: no PC usage. The principal finding of the Q1 insights report [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Top News

After analyzing billions of mobile app events during the first quarter of 2013, mobile apps measurement platform AppsFlyer discovered that social networks were the most effective mobile app marketing channel, but search delivered the highest quality of mobile app users. Comparing conversion rates, user quality and install volume across various channels, geographies, app categories, and user segments, the AppsFlyer Mobile App Discovery Report revealed that the most common mobile marketing channels included ad networks, app discovery platforms, cross sell opportunities, incentivized ad networ [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Google: Google Play | Marketing Tools: Analytics | Mobile Marketing | Social Media Marketing: Advertising | Statistics: Mobile Marketing

Google and Facebook combine to take up seven spots on Apple's newly-released list of the Top 25 all-time free iPhone apps. Apple published that list -- and three others -- as part of its countdown to 50 billion App Store downloads, which the company expects to happen soon. (Apple is giving away a $10,000 App Store credit to whomever completes the 50 billionth download and $500 credits to 50 others.) Those lists look at the most popular iPhone apps (free and paid) and iPad apps (free and paid). On the paid side, the majority of apps on both lists are games. But, there's more variety in th [...]

Related Topics: Apple | Apple: iOS | Apple: iPad | Apple: iPhone | Channel: Mobile Marketing | Facebook: Instagram | Facebook: Mobile | Google: Mobile | Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Top News

The March smartphone market share numbers are out from comScore. What we see is Apple gaining 2.7 points to maintain its lead as the top US smartphone maker. Samsung also gained slightly and remains the number two smartphone manufacturer in the US. All other hardware makers, including Google's troubled Motorola unit, lost ground. Below are the smartphone operating system share percentages. Android lost about a point and a half of share. Apple gained 2.7 percentage points. And Windows Phones saw a slight gain. These comScore data above stand in contrast to data released earlier in [...]

Related Topics: Apple: iOS | Apple: iPhone | Channel: Mobile Marketing | Google: Android | Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Market Share | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Top News

Amazon.com is the poster child of e-commerce, having grown from a bookseller to a company that sells just about anything and everything (and even has its own mobile devices). But, according to a new report, Amazon doesn't own the best growth rate among online retailers over the past 10 years. That honor goes to Urban Outfitters. According to the Internet Retailer 2013 Top 500 Guide, Urban Outfitters has experienced a 65.2 percent compound annual growth rate in the last decade -- putting it atop the rankings of online sales growth. Coming in second is the sports gear retailer Fanatics [...]

Related Topics: Amazon | Channel: Retail | E-Commerce | Statistics | Statistics: General

The weakened European economy has led eMarketer to revise its 2012 global media ad spending estimates down from close to $520 billion to just over $509 billion. The revision is based on ad spending figures from more than four dozen companies that track ad spending -- including research firms, media buyers and investment banks -- that eMarketer analyzes. Overall, global ad spending grew 5.4% in 2012, up from 3.8% in 2011. eMarketer predicts 2013 will stay on pace with 5.2% growth to hit $535.5 billion. Though 2017, the research company expects growth trends to remain steady, ranging betw [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Statistics: Spend Projections

A new GlobalWebIndex study analyzing international social media behavior revealed that mobile use and older Internet users are driving growth for Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. To conduct the Social Stream Q1 2013 study, GlobalWebIndex surveyed 31,779 consumers in 31 different countries, examining global social media behaviors during the first quarter of this year. According to the findings, Android and iOS users were more likely to be on social networks than average Internet users. In Japan, iOS users were 133 percent more likely to use Google+ than average Internet us [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook: Statistics | Google: Google+ | Mobile Marketing | Pinterest: Statistics | Statistics: Online Behavior | Statistics: Social Media | Top News | Twitter: Statistics

Perhaps the most potent – even shocking – finding of the 2013 US Mobile Path-to-Purchase Study is that 46 percent of survey respondents said they relied exclusively on their smartphones or tablets in conducting online research across a range of purchase categories. Nearly half of the adults involved in this study did not consult PCs as part of their pre-purchase research, search and discovery process. I was taken aback by that finding, so much so that I had to confirm and reconfirm it with xAd, one of the companies that co-sponsored the study. While these mobile-first or mobile-only [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Top News

Despite seemingly flat to declining market share for many months, Kantar Worldpanel (the market-research unit of ad agency holding company WPP) now says that Windows Phones are seeing gains in the US market as well as abroad. The chart below offers a comparison of smartphone OS share in Q1 2012 and the same period this year. According to the data Windows Phone grew from 3.7 percent in 2012 to 5.6 percent in Q1 2013 The company attributed the gains to first-time smartphone buyers upgrading from feature phones. Kantar says that its US consumer panel "is the largest continuous consum [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Statistics: Market Share | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Top News

With today's announcement of their viewability measurement tool, Active View, receiving accreditation from the Media Rating Council, Google released new data highlighting CTRs of display ads based on viewability metrics. According to their findings, users are up to 21 times more likely to click on a viewable ad. The viewability metric measures the percentage of an ad that is viewable on screen and the length of time the ad is displayed. To meet the IAB's standard for viewable impressions, at least, 50 percent of the ad must be viewable on screen for one second or longer. After comparing [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Google: Display Advertising | Marketing Tools: Analytics | Statistics: Online Advertising | Top News