Best of the Best: A Digital Benchmark

You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you stand – a truth which, in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing terms, out­lines why con­tex­tu­al­ly rel­e­vant data is vital for success.

Our team at Adobe Dig­i­tal Index have just shared their lat­est find­ings from the Best of the Best EMEA report which aims to help Euro­pean mar­keters find their place in the dig­i­tal “big pic­ture”. The report uses six key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors to estab­lish aver­age and top 20% per­for­mance bench­marks across the web.

This year’s study was dom­i­nat­ed by mobile and we saw some reveal­ing results:

• UK top for smart­phone vis­it rate, aver­ag­ing 31% of vis­its to a web page
• Tech­nol­o­gy and finan­cial ser­vice indus­tries trail behind for mobile browsing
• Slow­er growth for tablet brows­ing — retail sec­tor pulls ahead with 13.2% of vis­its from tablets
• Tele­com busi­ness­es best at attract­ing vis­i­tors to their web­sites and keep­ing them engaged
• Aver­age con­ver­sion rates fall across the board from 2013

I’m thrilled to once again be mod­er­at­ing the CMO.com pan­el at Adobe, where we’ll be dis­cussing these find­ings with bril­liant thought lead­ers from across Europe. To find about more, you can fol­low the exclu­sive pan­el live via #Adobe­Sum­mit at 12:00 BST tomor­row, Thurs­day 30th April 2015.

If you can’t wait until then, here is a quick run down of some of the key find­ings from the report from my per­spec­tive as well as our CMO.com pan­el experts.

Smart­phone brows­ing is grow­ing faster in Europe

We did notice coun­tries in Europe are see­ing a greater share of tablet site vis­its than the US, but it’s clear that smart­phones vis­its are dri­ving most vis­its overall

The UK was a clear win­ner, get­ting near­ly a third (31%) of its vis­its to web pages from smart­phones, a strong year-on-year (YOY) growth of +8.4%. The Nordics also per­formed well, with the aver­age web page get­ting a quar­ter (25%) of vis­its from smart­phones, a YOY growth of +8.7%. The only coun­try in Europe which expe­ri­enced a sim­i­lar rate to the US (+5.9%) was France which had a rate of growth at +5.6%.

The find­ings sur­prised Mar­tin Mey­er-Goss­ner, CEO of the inter­na­tion­al man­age­ment con­sult­ing brand The Strat­e­gy Web, in Germany:

“Mobile is dig­i­tal evo­lu­tion & rev­o­lu­tion. Ger­many behind UK & Nordics in smart­phone; last in tablet adop­tion? Trans­for­ma­tion call, Germany!?”

Fred Cavaz­za, pro­lif­ic thought leader on dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, mobile and social media and in France, believes enhanced expe­ri­ence on mobile devices have a big part to play:

“Smart­phone usages are accel­er­at­ing faster in Europe than US. As Android phones are get­ting bet­ter (iOS is low­er than 25% in France, Android is north of 60%), and users are get­ting more com­fort­able with them (brows­ing and searching)”

Con­sump­tion

Most coun­tries expe­ri­enced sim­i­lar trends across con­sump­tion last year, mea­sured by the amount of time spent on a web­site. Media & Enter­tain­ment received most smart­phone share of con­sump­tion – we saw a 37% dif­fer­ence between the Best of the Best & the average.

Doug Kessler, co-founder and cre­ative direc­tor of Veloc­i­ty Part­ners, the Lon­don-based B2B con­tent mar­ket­ing agency thinks that B2C is lead­ing the way and can pro­vide valu­able lessons for B2B.

“ It feels like we all have a lot to learn from the media and enter­tain­ment folks — the peo­ple who live and die by the amount of atten­tion they earn. Clear­ly, being bet­ter at user expe­ri­ence pays div­i­dends. I wouldn’t want to be a lag­gard in this scenario.”

Fred Cavaz­za, was quick to add that user expe­ri­ence is still affect­ed heav­i­ly by brand and distribution:

“Con­sump­tion is nar­row­ing because of frag­men­ta­tion between dif­fer­ent sites and sources (mobile app or oth­er­wise). The eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion is still tense, which means less mon­ey for each brand or distribution”

Stick­i­ness (the per­cent of traf­fic that stays and engages with a site)

When we reviewed stick­i­ness, over­all Euro­pean coun­tries are per­form­ing bet­ter than the US indi­cat­ing that in an increas­ing­ly glob­alised world, stan­dar­d­is­ing the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is becom­ing more important.

What was par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing, is that In Europe, around half of web­site vis­its last­ed more than one page across all coun­tries. UK, Ger­many and Benelux have improved aver­age stick­i­ness rates ver­sus 2013, but France and Nordics have seen rates fall . The stick­i­ness rate of the ‘best of the best’ com­pa­nies was up to 50% higher

Jer­ry Sil­fw­er, founder and dig­i­tal strate­gist at Mad Sci­ence Dig­i­tal sums up the online effi­cien­cy as start­ing from within:

“What sep­a­rates best-of-the-best when it comes to online mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions is that the win­ners have dis­cov­ered the pow­er of inbound mar­ket­ing. They test, they mon­i­tor and they iter­ate on the behav­iours of their inbound audi­ence. That’s how they win!”

Don’t for­get, you can fol­low the dis­cus­sion of this report via #Adobe­Sum­mit on Twit­ter at 12:00 BST tomor­row, Thurs­day 30th April 2015.