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As part of a weekly series, Digiday will be on the hunt for new statistics that have implications for digital marketers and ask industry experts to talk about what each stat means for brands. Here’s our third installment:
The average tenure for chief marketing officers of leading U.S. consumer brands is 42 months, according to SpencerStuart.
“This number portends a positive trend for CMOs, as the last time I’d heard about the average tenure of a CMO, it was more like 24 months,” said Greg Coleman, president of Criteo. “I think this has to do with [with them] coming to terms with the requirements of accountability and efficiency, generating a better partnership with the CFO, and becoming much more of a strategic partner to the c-suite. I expect this number to increase.”
Facebook had more than 425 million mobile monthly active users in December 2011.
“With the number of smartphone users continuing to grow, brands need to focus immediately on the establishment of a well-integrated, company-wide strategy for mobile and understand consumer preferences and behaviors when it comes to smartphone usage, and invest the time and resources to ensure the brand can deliver the best possible, mobile-focused consumer experience from start to finish,” said Cass Baker, evp of Leapfrog Online.
Eighty-nine percent of consumers use the Web to research products and services and most never look past the first page of their search results.
“The fact that most consumers never look past the first page of results potentially speaks to the high degree of relevancy that the search results provide — consumers find what they’re looking for right away and don’t need to dig deeper,” said Nikki Baird, managing partner at RSR Research. “For retailers and product searches, this stat just proves that their SEO strategy is critical — it’s not going to count unless you’re on the first returned page. Search in general is increasingly becoming a high-stakes game for capturing shoppers’ interests and ultimately their purchase.”
The average click-through rate online for display ads is .07 percent, and the average click-through for retargeted ads is about .7 percent.
“It is an oversimplification to average a CTR for display or even retargeted display ads. We see performance campaigns that are optimized for both CTR and conversions,” said Walter Knapp, evp of platform revenue at Federated Media. “We also see branding campaigns that don’t necessarily track or care about specific CTR but are more interested in unique and contextual placements where reader engagement is high. Typically, we see CTR fluctuate across different verticals of content from a low of roughly 0.02 percent to a high of nearly 1 percent. The [real-time bidding] buyers we work with optimize and target using many different strategies (including retargeting) to hit their CTR or other goals.”
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