Understanding online behaviour key to making the most of digital marketing investment

When trying to understand where to put digital marketing investment and budget, it is crucial to understand which route to market is the most effective for your customer base since you don’t want to be wasting investment on a path your customers don’t often tread.

A new study by TextMaster and Similar Web suggests that when broken down by country direct traffic dominates over other methods of accessing brands such as search, referral or social with direct traffic the highest for German customers.

And yet for online dominant industries such as fashion, mobile apps and news and entertainment it is search traffic that provides the biggest generator of visits over direct hits. The research shows that for apps search traffic generates nearly half of all visits (46%). In fashion a third of visits come through search traffic and for news and entertainment 29%. Paid search generates the most amount of traffic for fashion companies at 14% whilst for news and entertainment the amount of traffic is minimal at only 0.43%.

Broken down by country the number of internet users using search engines to find fashion websites was highest in both the UK and France at 42% and 39% respectively.

The success of display ads meanwhile differs according to both industry and country with the method the most effective for driving traffic in Italy. For the fashion industry display ads generate 7.36% of traffic compared to only 1.23% for entertainment.

The study also showed the role of referral traffic with the method twice as important in the US at 30% than in the UK which hit only 16%.

Despite social increasingly being adopted by the fashion industry the research found that whilst social networks generated 19% of traffic for the news and entertainment industry for fashion it was minimal at 5%. However across industries it was Facebook that topped the chart as the top social network as driving most traffic.

Resources: marketingtechnews.co